Home energy can be complicated, especially if you’re trying to figure it out alone.

Neighbourhood Warmth is our vision of a free, online platform that helps people to form teams around shared home energy challenges – like retrofit assessments, draught-proofing, or energy flexibility.

Our research suggests that not only does working together make things easier, it can also unlock other benefits, like group buying discounts, reduced disruption, and access to funding.

And by building a platform that enables ‘teams’ like this to spring up around the country, we can connect teams addressing similar challenges, so that they can learn from and share best practice with each other, catalysing more—and more effective—home energy action across the UK.

How it works

At first, we’re planning to work with local authorities and local energy services co-ops to focus and stimulate home energy action in their areas. We’ll work with them to identify early adopters who can seed ‘teams’ in their neighbourhoods, and get the ball rolling!

Then, as the teams start working their way through our expert-designed step-by-step ‘challenges’, their confidence and knowledge grows, until they’ve achieved, together, a goal that they never could have managed individually – like getting whole house retrofit assessments along their street, or raising money for a local cause by using less energy at peak times.

Teams can decide whether to be private (for invited members only) or open, meaning anybody in the area would be able to find and join them. Team members are welcome to share their team’s Neighbourhood Warmth page on social media, like Facebook, Nextdoor, and their local WhatsApp groups, to invite their neighbours to take part.

Eventually, our aim is for anyone, anywhere in the UK, to be able to start a ‘team’ in their neighbourhood – maybe they might invite the neighbours on their street, or maybe their friends from the gym or community centre. Neighbourhood Warmth’s guidance will give them everything they need to upskill themselves, and their teammates—an approach sometimes called “train the trainer”—and connections to other teams, near or far away, who have addressed similar challenges to them, will give an extra layer of support and encouragement.

We’re currently exploring sustainable and transparent funding models for Neighbourhood Warmth, to make it a self-sustaining, not-for-profit service. Potential routes include a financial contribution from local authorities (as a marketing/delivery expense in their distribution of central government funding schemes like Warm Homes and the Home Upgrade Grant); a paid feed of data on interest in and uptake of home energy actions, for local authorities and local service providers; or commission paid by home energy service providers or suppliers who gain referrals through the platform.

Where Neighbourhood Warmth came from

Neighbourhood Warmth was first conceived by participants in one of our 2022 Prototyping Weeks, which looked at how we could use a concept called ‘conditional commitment’ (think Kickstarter or Groupon pledges) to overcome participation barriers in home energy action.

The cost and complexity of home energy actions like retrofit assessments and heat pumps came up as a major problem in our workshops – but participants generally agreed that both of these barriers could be overcome if groups of householders could be encouraged to explore solutions together. We’ve seen examples of community-led retrofit like this, on a small scale, in a number of pilot locations over the last few years – our question was whether we could use mySociety’s data and development expertise to enable these groups to form organically, across the whole of the UK.

We went on to design and test an alpha version of a platform to do this, with Dark Matter Labs in 2023, and ran a pilot of Neighbourhood Warmth with Carbon Co-op in 2023, as part of a campaign around energy flexibility in Marple, Greater Manchester.

Our work on Neighbourhood Warmth so far has been funded by Quadrature Climate Foundation, the National Lottery Community Fund, and Aurora Trust.