The project seeks to improve outcomes for customers whose health is adversely affected by living in a cold home by creating a trusted, health-led route into SPEN’s fuel poverty support. Through secure referrals, faster triage and tailored interventions, including meaningful energy credit, income maximisation, energy-efficiency measures and damp and mould support, WARMTH will help households maintain warmer, healthier homes, improve the customer experience and reduce avoidable pressure on health services.

For SPEN, the trial will test whether targeting medically at-risk households improves delivery efficiency and generates greater social value than conventional fuel poverty pathways. The project will also establish the operational, data and delivery evidence required to scale the model in Phase 3, across ED3 and potentially to other DNOs.

Benefits

The Cost Benefit Analysis for project WARMTH is based on the upcoming ED3 period – this reflects the vulnerability team’s expectation for this model to be adopted within the next regulatory period following this trial. Please see the file ‘WARMTH CBA’ for full details, including detailed assumptions.

Project WARMTH is expected to generate gross benefits between £651k and £1.13m for SPEN over the ED3 period. After the NIA funding requested for this project is considered (i.e. £373,350) WARMTH is expected to result in net benefits between £279k and £757k
The range of benefits is based on the proportion of support delivered to vulnerable customers in ED3 via the WARMTH delivery model. The two scenarios considered are 25% and 50% of all Fuel Poverty services.