The Warm Homes Plan is the UK Government's flagship home energy efficiency programme for this Parliament. With £13.2 billion committed over five years, it is the largest sustained investment in domestic retrofit in UK history — and it will define the retrofit sector's activity through to 2030.
For housing associations, the Warm Homes Plan represents both a major funding opportunity and a significant compliance challenge. Understanding how the schemes work, what they require and how to deliver at scale is essential for any organisation with a large housing stock to decarbonise.
The Warm Homes Social Housing Fund
The Warm Homes Social Housing Fund (WSHSF) is the primary funding route for housing associations and local authority registered housing providers. It is the successor to the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, which itself succeeded the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Demonstrator.
The scheme provides capital funding for energy efficiency and clean heat measures in social housing — targeting the worst-performing properties first. Eligible landlords bid for funding through a competitive application process administered by DESNZ.
Who is eligible?
- Registered providers of social housing in England
- Local authorities with social housing stock
- Applications can include mixed tenure developments where social housing properties constitute the majority
- Properties must be currently below EPC Band C
What measures are funded?
- Insulation — loft, cavity wall, solid wall (internal and external), floor
- Heat pumps — air source and ground source
- Solar photovoltaic panels and battery storage
- Solar thermal
- Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery
- High heat retention storage heaters
- Smart heating controls
- Low energy lighting
PAS2035 requirement: PAS2035 compliance is a mandatory condition of the WSHSF for all fabric measures and all heat pump installations. Non-compliance risks clawback of the grant funding. All works must be lodged with TrustMark.
The Warm Homes Local Grant
The Warm Homes Local Grant (WHLG) sits alongside the WSHSF but operates differently. Local authorities are the delivery body — they receive the funding and are responsible for identifying eligible households, procuring delivery partners and managing compliance.
The scheme targets owner-occupied and privately rented properties occupied by households on low incomes, with properties below EPC Band D in most cases.
What does this mean for housing associations?
Housing associations can become delivery partners for local authorities delivering the WHLG — particularly where they have established relationships with contractors and coordination capacity. This creates an indirect route to the WHLG for organisations with retrofit delivery expertise.
The compliance challenge at scale
Delivering PAS2035-compliant retrofit at the scale these schemes require is fundamentally a coordination problem. The more properties in a programme, the more complex the coordination overhead — more assessors, more coordinators, more designers, more installers, more communications, more documents.
The organisations that will deliver most effectively are those that have addressed this coordination overhead systematically — through tooling, process design and supply chain management — rather than trying to scale manual processes.
Key risk: Non-conformities discovered at TrustMark lodgement stage create programme delays that have a cascading effect on subsequent instalments of grant funding. Preventing non-conformities through rigorous stage-by-stage compliance checking is significantly less expensive than resolving them at lodgement.
How PASDOC supports Warm Homes Plan delivery
PASDOC is built specifically for the coordination requirements of large-scale funded retrofit programmes. The platform manages the full PAS2035 lifecycle across all properties in a programme — with automated compliance checking at each stage, consistent documentation across all delivery partners, and complete portfolio visibility for programme managers.
For housing associations bidding for WSHSF funding, PASDOC strengthens the compliance narrative in applications — demonstrating that the organisation has the systems in place to deliver at scale without the quality risks that have affected previous programmes.