Local authorities and social housing providers are responsible for procuring and installing low-carbon heating in social housing, largely backed by government funding schemes designed to decarbonise homes and cut energy bills for lower-income households. The funding schemes vary across England, Scotland and Wales.

Through recent work in Bristol looking at the quality of heat pump installations, we identified potential improvements to the procurement process which could lead to better long-term system performance. This project will investigate what lessons can be applied to the wider sector, test key hypotheses around what influences procurement choices and work collaboratively with local authorities and housing providers to develop approaches that ensure clean heat funding delivers the best possible outcomes for residents, providers and governments.

Our goal is to establish an actionable evidence base on heat pump procurement across social housing.

Achieving would result in the following:

• For residents - reliable, well-installed heat pumps that keep homes comfortably and affordably warm, and avoid any post-installation disruption
• For housing providers - smoother delivery, stronger contract standards, higher confidence in installations and reduced maintenance liabilities
• For governments - maximum value for money from limited public funding, and tackling strategic aims such as decarbonising homes and fuel poverty.

While significant attention is now being paid to installer accreditations and consumer protection for households that can afford to purchase a heat pump, the procurement process in social housing remains largely unexamined. 

In practice, contractual choices made early on set the parameters for how well a heating system performs years down the line. Non-technical teams are often tasked with procuring complex, unfamiliar technologies without the specialist training or practical tools needed to interrogate designs and spot potential red flags. If teams lack the technical capability to challenge flawed proposals, even well-intentioned procurement can lock in poor outcomes. 

The aim of this project is to investigate these potential capability and commercial barriers. This will be used to identify potential interventions that could ensure providers have the skills and frameworks to procure with confidence as clean heat rollout scales.

We are running an exploratory project to understand how clean heat is procured across social housing and where the process can be improved. Working closely with local authorities, housing associations, and industry partners, we are:

• validating the scale of the challenge - building on early signals from our work with Bristol City Council to test whether procurement and quality assurance are issues across the sector
• mapping the end-to-end procurement journey - interviewing local authority teams, housing association asset managers and procurement specialists to map every stage of the process
• diagnosing root causes and testing assumptions - investigating any underlying barriers to quality, including internal technical capability gaps, time pressures from short-term grant funding windows and misaligned commercial incentives across the supply chain
• co-designing and testing potential solutions, which may include:
  • tailored, practical training to help non-technical delivery teams interrogate contractor designs and spot technical red flags
  • structural improvements to standard tender frameworks and contract clauses
  • policy recommendations for central government (ie, the grant funding conditions)
  • smarter commercial and oversight models, such as independent quality assurance and automated design verification tools

We would welcome speaking to you if you have experience or views on this area of work. Please get in touch with Tom Leach ([email protected]) if you would like to set up a call.