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BEIS reveals details of £3.8bn Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund

The government’s £3.8bn Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund is likely to be distributed in four waves over the next decade, a senior civil servant has said.

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Mark Harrison, project director of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (picture: The Retrofit Challenge: Virtual Summit)
Mark Harrison, project director of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (picture: The Retrofit Challenge: Virtual Summit)
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The government’s £3.8bn Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund is likely to be distributed in four waves over the next decade #UKhousing

Speaking at Inside Housing’s The Retrofit Challenge: Virtual Summit, Matt Harrison, who is the lead on the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), said the department plans to offer an initial wave of £60m to the sector either in the summer or autumn this year.

This £60m has already been confirmed by The Treasury as part of last year’s Spending Review and must be spent during this financial year.

Beyond that, Mr Harrison said BEIS is planning to release funding as part of “three-year waves”, with each of the waves being worth over £1bn. He said this was based on the assumption that more funding is given via the Spending Review.

The Conservative Party promised a £3.8bn Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund in its 2019 election manifesto.


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In July last year, an initial £50m fund was announced in order to fund demonstrator projects that will inform how the larger multi-year fund is developed. The £50m was part of the chancellor’s plan to create jobs in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, with funding to be spent by the end of this financial year.

Seventeen projects were selected to receive a share of this funding, which will collectively upgrade the energy efficiency of 2,000 of the worst-performing social homes.

Mr Harrison said BEIS is planning to “cascade” the learnings from these projects out “through a body of knowledge that everybody should have access to”.

He acknowledged that housing associations were not given “particularly much time to reflect” on the initial £50m fund due to the speed at which the money had to be spent.

“My message to anybody listening, if you are wishing to bid for future schemes, do start thinking about it now. We will endeavour to give more time but this short wave is a one-year wave,” he said in reference to the upcoming £60m fund.

Mr Harrison said that despite the short timescale for the initial £50m wave of funding, BEIS received a “decent number of bids”.

However, he said some housing associations did not have the “capacity” or “knowledge or understanding of their stock” to submit a bid.

He added: “There’s a bit of further engagement necessary for us to reach out to some of the housing associations who need more help to understand their stock.”

The government is looking to establish “a technical assistance facility that will provide targeted help to housing associations to actually allow them to write a business case, to do the stock analysis, to come up with solutions, to try and engage the most appropriate commercial model”, he said.

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