Cold homes continue to benefit from National Grid’s £150m Warm Homes Fund

Affordable Warmth Solutions (AWS) a not-for-profit company runs the Warm Homes Fund on behalf of National Grid, installing affordable heating solutions in fuel poor households who do not use gas as their primary heating.

AWS is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year, and today (November 29) on national Fuel Poverty Awareness Day, it is launching a report covering a decade of the fight to eradicate fuel poverty. It has to date connected 48,000 homes to mains gas and supported a further 42,000 homes through the Warms Home Fund. This represents lifetime environmental savings of 3.5million tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of taking 580,000 cars off the road permanently.

Householders covering the length and breadth of the country from rural locations including Scottish Islands, Norfolk and Suffolk to the extremities of the south west of Cornwall, together with urban towns and cities including boroughs of London, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle, and onwards to the coastal towns of North Wales and Plymouth – they have all benefited from the Warm Homes Fund, with many seeing electric storage heaters replaced with new energy efficient gas heating systems and renewable technologies such as air / ground source heat pumps. The Warm Homes Fund is not just about new heating systems, it also provides support to a vast array of organisations, bringing together charities, health boards, councils and the private sector to promote energy efficiency and/or health related programmes.

Chris Bennett, Director of UK Regulation for National Grid said: "We support Fuel Poverty Awareness Day and The Warm Homes Fund, because nobody should have to live in cold, damp and energy inefficient homes.
“I’ve seen at first-hand the difference AWS and the Warm Homes Fund has made to make fuel poor households warmer and improve the health of people suffering the most severe levels of fuel poverty.”

Jeremy Nesbitt, Managing Director for Affordable Warmth Solutions said: “The Warm Homes Fund together with the relationships we’ve built with local authorities, housing associations and other local delivery partners has already helped to lift tens of thousands of people out of fuel poverty and given them a better chance in life as a result.”

He added, “we’ve recently commissioned an independent evaluation of the Warm Homes Fund and we will work with Government to learn the lessons and develop a blueprint for the future delivery of such programmes, that wouldn’t have been possible without the investment by National Grid”.

For more information on the Warm Homes Fund, bidding process and eligibility, visit the Warm Homes Fund page.

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 Helen Blake
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Notes to Editors: 
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