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Moving tenants into homes without a bed, cooker or fridge carries a cost to health, tenancies and the public purse that furnished tenancy schemes are designed to remove. At a Glance - Furniture poverty is a health issue as well as a housing one: around a million people are missing three or more essential items, and around a million children live in households that cannot afford basic furniture and appliances. - A rental model for furnished tenancies needs no capital outlay from the landlord, yet only around 3% of social lets are furnished, against 30% in the private rented sector. - The Crisis and Resilience Fund brings three years of planning certainty, but local welfare scheme closures and cash only provision for furniture risk leaving gaps, and the sector ask remains legislation for at least 10% of general needs social homes to be furnished. Moving a tenant into a home with no bed, cooker, fridge or floor covering is a health decision as well as a lettings one. Without a bed, sleep and musculoskeletal health suffer. Without a fridge or cooker, fresh food cannot be stored or prepared, and medication that needs refrigeration has nowhere to go. Clothes kept in bin bags, bare floorboards and the absence of curtains wear on mood daily, and the effect on mental health carries into physical health. In hot weather, no curtains, blinds or fridge freezer removes the basic means of keeping cool. End Furniture Poverty’s 2026 research describes furniture poverty as a public health crisis. Host: Jenny Danson, CEO and Co-Founder, Healthy Homes Hub Guest: Claire Donovan, Director, End Furniture Poverty

David Snow, CEO of EnergyCloud England, explains how curtailed wind power could heat homes for tenants living in fuel poverty, and why social housing providers are starting to take note. At a Glance - £1.5 billion of renewable energy was curtailed, switched off, in the first six months of 2026, equivalent to roughly £3 billion a year, with the constraint penalties paid to generators landing on every household's energy bill. - EnergyCloud redirects that surplus energy into homes in fuel poverty through automated immersion controllers on hot water tanks, storage heaters, and demand flexibility messaging, funded through retailer credits rather than new charges. - Healthy Homes Hub and Yorkshire Housing are working with EnergyCloud to scale the model across social housing in England, following schemes already established in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland. In the first six months of 2026, 5,600 gigawatt hours of renewable generation, worth an estimated £1.5 billion, was switched off because there was nowhere for it to go, a rate that projects to roughly £3 billion a year. Official government figures put three million households in England in fuel poverty, while the charity National Energy Action estimates the true figure at six to seven million, using a measure of 10 per cent or more of household income spent on energy bills. The two problems, an abundance of wasted clean power and millions of households unable to afford to heat their homes, sit side by side without a mechanism connecting them. Host: Jenny Danson, CEO and Co-Founder, Healthy Homes Hub Guest: David Snow, CEO, EnergyCloud England

Ongo runs its own counselling service because mental health was the barrier stopping tenants from using its employment and skills support. Host: Helen Greig, Relationship Director, Healthy Homes Hub Guest: Steve Hepworth, Chief Executive, Ongo Homes At a Glance - OngoTalk was launched in 2023 after Ongo’s employment and skills teams found that mental health problems were stopping people moving forward, with NHS waits of up to two years in some areas. Eight counsellors registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy now work inside the same team, and the service is free to Ongo tenants. - A survey of Ongo’s roughly 12,000 tenants drew over 1,500 responses, around 13%, and 52% said mental health and wellbeing support was important to them. - Supervising counsellors, including student placements, needs a certain scale, so organisations without it may do better to buy in a service or learn from Ongo’s experience. Employment and skills support stalls when mental health barriers go unaddressed. That finding led Ongo to launch OngoTalk in 2023. After lockdown, a growing share of the people using Ongo’s employment and skills services were held back by mental health problems, alongside the financial worries, relationship breakdown and housing issues the teams already supported. With NHS waiting lists of up to two years in some cases, Ongo built its own team of eight counsellors, all registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and embedded within the skills and personal development team. The service is free to Ongo tenants. Landlords interested in taking the conversation further can contact Steve Hepworth at [email protected].

Part six of six of the special podcast series bringing Healthy Homes Hub and Energiesprong UK's playbook, 'Deploying Innovative Retrofit Funding Models in the Social Housing Sector' (also available as an audiobook), to life, on how a free app built on smart meter data cuts bills before any hardware is installed, and why that is what keeps Metis's zero upfront cost solar and battery offer affordable to run. Host: Emily Braham, Director, Energiesprong UK Guest: Tom Woolley, Director of Low Carbon, Residential, Metis At a Glance -A free Energy Insights app, built on smart meter data residents already pay for, reduces bills by 9 per cent before any retrofit through behavioural nudges alone, and drove an 85 per cent conversion rate to Metis's paid solar and battery subscription in one deployment, keeping acquisition costs, and the subscription fee, low. -Metis funds, owns and maintains solar, battery and heat pump assets on a 25 year term at no upfront cost to the landlord, and needs no airspace lease or charge on the property, which is what lets it deploy quickly across mixed tenure stock and flats. -Residents can expect a gross saving of around £1,150 a year from day one, based on the average reduction recorded across Metis's deployed systems, with a net benefit of £300 to £400 after a typical £60 a month landlord subscription fee, plus the option for landlords to monetise pooled battery capacity as a virtual power plant and choose whether to share that revenue with residents. Metis's route to a low acquisition cost starts before any hardware is installed. A free Energy Insights app, built on smart meter data that residents already pay for through the national metering system, shows a household how it currently uses energy and offers behavioural nudges, such as flagging appliances left running or comparing usage to similar homes. On its own, without any retrofit, the app has reduced bills by 9 per cent. In one deployment where the app was rolled out ahead of the retrofit offer, 85 per cent of residents who used it went on to take up the paid solar and battery subscription, a conversion rate that keeps the cost of acquiring and engaging customers low, and that in turn is what keeps the subscription fee affordable.

Part five of the six-part special podcast series bringing Healthy Homes Hub and Energiesprong UK's playbook, 'Deploying Innovative Retrofit Funding Models in the Social Housing Sector' (also available as an audiobook), to life, on how a locally agreed tariff, set using half hourly smart meter data, lets residents buy power generated on their own street below the grid rate while easing strain on the local network. Host: Emily Braham, Director, Energiesprong UK Guest: Dr Mary Gillie, Founder and Director, Energy Local At a Glance -Energy Local uses half hourly smart meter data to match residents with locally generated renewable power at an agreed price, below the standard grid rate for residents and above the wholesale rate for the generator, while also easing strain on the local network by shifting demand toward when local power is available. -A newer case study extends the model into a whole systems approach, combining local power generation, a heat network and retrofit under one investment, using grants for the retrofit element and patient equity capital for the power generation asset. -The regulatory framework governing electricity supply dates from 1989 and was not designed for local generation; Energy Local's route through it relies on partnering with an external licensed supplier instead of making residents responsible for their neighbours' unpaid bills. Energy Local's model rests on half hourly smart meter data, which can show precisely when a household is drawing power at the same time as a local renewable generator is producing it. That data allows a locally agreed price to be set for the electricity used in that window, a price lower than the standard grid rate for residents and higher than the wholesale rate the generator would otherwise receive by selling into the national market. The result works on both sides: households pay less for power that is demonstrably local, and generators earn more than they would from a wholesale sale.

Professor Sarah Ayres on the Bristol led research that has put a monetary value on the health costs of urban development, and what it means for housing providers. At a Glance - No government department holds a remit for the health effects of urban development, so decisions on housing, transport and infrastructure are made without health evidence attached. - The HAUS model, developed through the TRUUD research programme, puts a monetary value on the health costs of poor urban design and traces where those costs land, mostly on families and businesses rather than the health service. It has now been added to MHCLG’s national appraisal guidance. - Community testimony and video evidence have done as much to shift decision makers as the economic case, particularly on issues such as damp, mould and fear of using public space. No part of government holds a remit for the health effects of urban development. Housing, transport and infrastructure decisions are taken by people whose remit is delivery, not the illness that follows from poor design. A senior official at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government put it directly: we build houses, we don’t deal with asthma cases. That gap in responsibility is the starting point for TRUUD, Tackling Root Causes Upstream of Unhealthy Urban Development, a £6.6 million research consortium that ran from 2019 to 2025, led from the University of Bristol by Professor Sarah Ayres, involving 50 researchers across six institutions.

Part four of the six part special podcast series bringing Healthy Homes Hub and Energiesprong UK's playbook, 'Deploying Innovative Retrofit Funding Models in the Social Housing Sector' (also available as an audiobook), to life, on how a data led microgrid model has let Emergent Energy deliver rooftop solar savings to residents across 750 Hackney flats without any additional wiring in the home. Host: Emily Braham, Director, Energiesprong UK Guest: Reg Platt, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Emergent Energy At a Glance -Emergent Energy's microgrid model distributes the value of rooftop solar to residents in flats through a supply and billing arrangement, not physical rewiring, solving the split incentive and cost problem that has historically kept solar off retrofit flats. -The Hackney scheme, a megawatt of solar across 27 blocks and 47 microgrids serving 750 flats, gives residents a guaranteed 15 per cent saving against the Ofgem default tariff, and works identically for renters, leaseholders and communal supplies. -Emergent operates under the electricity licence exemption regime, following a five year process with Ofgem to change industry codes, meaning no electricity regulation liability sits with the housing provider. Solar has historically been kept off flats not by a lack of demand but by a wiring rule. Metering and wiring regulations required rooftop solar to be plugged into the landlord supply, sending the bulk of the generation into low on site usage or an export deal that was often too much hassle to arrange, while residents received no benefit at all. Emergent Energy's microgrid model removes that constraint without any additional wiring or hardware in the flat itself. Instead, a data and software led supply arrangement distributes the value of solar directly to residents, communal areas and other loads within a block, an approach now proven at scale in a flagship project with Hackney Council.

Part three of the six part special podcast series bringing Healthy Homes Hub and Energiesprong UK's playbook, 'Deploying Innovative Retrofit Funding Models in the Social Housing Sector' (also available as an audiobook), to life, on how splitting the value of solar and battery installations between landlord and tenant is what let Together Housing's pilot scale beyond a handful of homes. Host: Emily Braham, Director, Energiesprong UK Guest: Tom Griffith, Social Housing Partnerships Lead, Octopus Energy At a Glance - Tenant Power addresses the barrier that stalled Octopus's earlier Zero Bills model: a sub-meter and a fixed 30 per cent discount off the standard variable tariff let landlords earn a return from the battery's grid flexibility, instead of passing all the benefit to the tenant with none coming back. - Together Housing, whose five years of trialling an earlier version of this approach fed directly into how Tenant Power was designed, is now scaling to 1,500 properties with West Yorkshire Combined Authority funding, and the model has since been extended to 12 partner landlords covering over 100,000 properties. - Installing solar and battery at scale in one area can strain a local substation even though each individual system falls under the threshold that would normally need a distribution network operator application, so early engagement with the network operator is treated as essential to rollout. Tenant Power is designed to solve the scaling problem built into Octopus's earlier Zero Bills tariff, where a home fitted with solar, battery and a heat pump gets a guaranteed zero energy bill for five to ten years. Under that model, the full financial benefit sits with the tenant and none returns to the landlord, which makes it difficult to fund installations across a large stock. A sub-meter is the mechanism that changes this: it bills all of a tenant's consumption on a standard variable tariff at a fixed 30 per cent discount, while the landlord's solar and battery are separately optimised and traded on the grid to generate a revenue stream back to the landlord.

Why housing providers who build for a narrow idea of a general needs customer are excluding a quarter of the people who might live in, or visit, their homes. At a Glance - General needs housing is built around an assumed customer, but with around 25% of people reporting a disability, that assumption no longer holds for a large share of the stock providers manage. - Harry's Pledge, founded five years ago and now backed by around 100 organisations, asks housing providers, employers and offices to commit to accessible design, workplace flexibility and support for carers, choosing which commitments they can meet. - Harry's Pals, the charity set up alongside the pledge, matches parent carers with free counselling, addressing a toll that leaves more than 40% of parent carers having thought about suicide. General needs housing is designed around an assumed customer, typically someone without significant mobility, sensory or care needs. Around 25% of people report having a disability, and only around 8% of homes are estimated to be visitable. The effect extends beyond the household directly affected. It limits who can visit a disabled resident, and who that resident can visit in turn, including elderly relatives who may depend on being visited rather than travelling themselves.

Part two of the six part special podcast series bringing Healthy Homes Hub and Energiesprong UK's playbook, 'Deploying Innovative Retrofit Funding Models in the Social Housing Sector' (also available as an audiobook), to life, on how a supplier funded solar and battery model can remove both the upfront cost and the asset ownership question from a landlord's side of the ledger. Host: Emily Braham, Director, Energiesprong UK Guest: Caitlin Berridge-Dunn, Head of External Affairs, Utilita At a Glance - Social Spark funds, owns, installs and maintains solar and battery systems on social homes over 25 years at no upfront cost to the landlord, with residents given the choice, not the obligation, to switch supplier for the saving. - The model works whether or not a tenant switches: those who move to Utilita save around 20 per cent against the price cap, while surplus solar generation is exported regardless, which is what de-risks the investment on Utilita's side. - Prepayment customers, often assumed to be disengaged, showed 89 per cent take-up in an early demand flexibility trial, a pattern Utilita says now shapes how it designs and communicates offers like this one. Social Spark removes both the upfront cost and the asset ownership question from a landlord's side of the arrangement. Utilita funds, owns, installs and maintains solar and battery systems on a social home for a 25 year period, with no capital outlay and no borrowing required from the landlord. Residents are then given a choice, not an obligation: they can switch to Utilita and pay a daily subscription set at around 20 per cent below the energy price cap, or stay with their existing supplier.

Part ONE of the SIX part special podcast series bringing Healthy Homes Hub and Energiesprong UK's playbook, 'Deploying Innovative Retrofit Funding Models in the Social Housing Sector' (also available as an audiobook), to life, unpacking why off balance sheet finance depends on investors carrying performance risk, not just capital, a shift that widens what landlords can fund beyond their own borrowing headroom for warmer, more affordable homes. Host: Emily Braham, Director, Energiesprong UK Guest: James Williams, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Sero At a Glance - Off balance sheet finance depends on the investor carrying performance and delivery risk for the retrofit technology, not just providing capital, which is what allows it to sit outside a landlord's own balance sheet. - Sero Bright combines solar and battery installation with an ongoing operator role, managing the technology and billing tenants directly, with adoption driven by trust built at community level. - The suggested test for providers new to this: weigh the 30 year cost of continuing energy spend under business as usual against the retrofit investment, rather than judging the retrofit cost on its own.

Healthy Homes Hub's new hub responds to a wetter winter and a record run of summer heatwaves, helping providers prepare homes and communities for both extremes. At a Glance - UK housing is contending with a compressed climate pattern, increasingly described as two extreme seasons rather than four, following one of the wettest winters on record and a confirmed run of five consecutive UK heatwaves this summer. - Homes designed around retaining winter heat are now also having to manage overheating, a risk the second phase of Awaab's Law is expected to bring into regulatory scope alongside its existing focus on damp, mould and underheating. - Retrofit and construction work face their own narrower temperature windows, since many building products and materials have defined ranges for safe and effective installation. UK social housing has moved from planning for climate change to living with it. One of the wettest winters in decades has been followed by a confirmed run of five consecutive UK heatwaves and a record number of days above 30 degrees, a pattern increasingly described as two extreme seasons rather than four. The second phase of Awaab's Law is expected to extend into overheating, expanding regulatory focus beyond damp, mould and underheating. Healthy Homes Hub has launched its tenth specialist hub, a Climate Resilience Hub backed by RE:GEN Group, to treat adaptation as a present-day operational issue rather than a longer-term policy question. The Climate Resilience Hub aims to keep discussion of adaptation and mitigation focused on health outcomes for residents rather than political debate, and to make the subject accessible rather than the preserve of technical specialists or policymakers. In practice, this will take the form of regular discussion between the two hosts on live climate headlines, guest contributions from within housing and beyond, and articles and opinion pieces published on the hub's website from RE:GEN Group and other contributors across the sector. Call to Action Housing providers, local authorities and others working on community resilience are invited to contact the hub directly, via Andy Cameron-Smith ([email protected]), to take part in future discussions.

Two housing associations explain why creating dedicated healthy homes roles is a structural response to the gap between KPI-driven repairs and the outcomes residents and regulation now require. At a glance - Regulatory pressure from Awaab's Law, HHSRS, the Decent Homes Standard and the drive toward proactive asset management is pushing housing associations to restructure around outcomes rather than repair metrics, and dedicated healthy homes roles are one visible expression of that shift. - Both Riverside and Bromford Flagship Live West named their new posts after the outcome they want to deliver, not the problem they are managing, a deliberate signal that the role exists to pursue health, not just contain damp and mould. - The commercial case for proactive healthy homes investment is inseparable from the resident case: fewer recalls, fewer complaints, lower reactive costs, reduced regulatory exposure, and rebuilt resident trust. Housing associations have long structured their repairs functions around metrics: speed of response, job closure rates, time-to-repair. Two senior practitioners in dedicated healthy homes roles argue that this model is reaching its limits, and that the regulatory and resident context now demands something structurally different. Billy Cliffen is Healthy and Modern Homes Manager at Riverside, a national landlord managing approximately 75,000 homes. Nora Ragze is Head of Healthy Homes at Bromford Flagship Live West, formed from a recent sector merger and managing around 120,000 homes. Both roles were created from scratch and placed within strategic asset management, deliberately close to long-term investment planning rather than day-to-day repairs delivery.

How Birmingham City Council is transforming one of the country's largest social housing portfolios by treating resident knowledge as indispensable to investment design. At a Glance Residents who help shape investment become its most effective advocates. Birmingham's programme shows physical improvement and resident engagement are not separate workstreams, they are the same one. Birmingham entered 2023 with decency at 28%, an ombudsman intervention and a regulatory breach; £600m+ invested has brought decency to 45%, with a committed trajectory to 100% by 2032. Modular extensions are clearing disabled adaptation backlogs in 14 weeks at comparable cost to traditional build, with pilots now expanding to full modular bungalows on vacant garage sites. The most defensible investment in housing is one residents choose to defend themselves. When Birmingham City Council's refurbishment programme reached completed blocks, residents stopped needing housing officers to explain the value of what had been done. They photographed their buildings and sent the pictures to family in other cities. They told visitors their estate was no longer what people assumed it was. That shift, from reluctant tolerance of disruption to unsolicited pride, is the practical outcome of an asset management approach built around resident engagement from the outset.

Orbit's dynamic thermal modelling shows which homes and residents face the greatest overheating risk, and why climate adaptation now needs to sit inside every retrofit and asset strategy. At a Glance - Awaab's Law brings excess heat under the same statutory response timeframes as damp and mould from 30 November 2026, giving landlords a fixed compliance deadline rather than a seasonal concern. - Bungalows, and bedrooms facing south or on upper floors, emerge as the highest overheating risk archetypes in research modelling 26 property types across seven locations. - Climate adaptation works best folded into existing retrofit, decarbonisation and asset management strategies, rather than run as a separate investment stream competing for its own budget. Overheating in social housing is moving from a seasonal complaint to a regulated hazard. From 30 November 2026, the second phase of Awaab's Law places excess heat inside the same statutory timeframes that already cover damp and mould, meaning landlords will need to investigate and act on heat risk to a fixed schedule, not only when residents raise it. Research from Orbit's Head of Asset Optimisation, Gemma Brookes, sets out why that shift matters, and what a proactive response looks like across a large, geographically varied housing stock spanning the Midlands, the South, and into Kent. The research uses dynamic thermal simulation, run through IES software, to model 26 property archetypes across seven locations rather than relying on resident surveys alone. Climate projections from Exeter University's Prometheus weather files extend the modelling out to 2050 and 2080, testing how today's homes will perform as the climate continues to warm. A new hybrid overheating metric combines the CIBSE TM59 and TM52 standards with British Standard adaptation categories, and extends beyond daytime conditions to cover night time overheating and its effect on sleep, an area existing definitions had left out.