Collateral advantages of flexible eligibility regimes for finding fuel poverty in the UK

The Warm Homes Fund (WHF), active between 2019 and 2022, awarded grants totalling more than £150mn, paid for by investment from National Grid PLC. The grants were used to deliver interventions to fuel-poor and vulnerable households across Great Britain. This paper draws on research with organisations involved in delivering Warm Homes funded installations to reveal the careful and inclusive work done by those working on the ground to find fuel poverty. The paper examines the work of project development organisations to counter the dominant framing of policy targeting, in which targeting accuracy based on official data is seen as a gold standard. Instead, the authors reveal the importance and the collateral advantages unlocked by a flexible eligibility regime that enables relational, placed-based partnering work to find and capture as much fuel poverty as possible. By framing the benefits of this work as ‘collateral advantages’, the authors counter the assumption that inaccuracy is inefficiency. Instead, flexible eligibility is shown to enable local collaboration which in turn fosters local capacity, new partnerships and prevents the most vulnerable from ‘falling between the cracks’. • Flexible and inclusive eligibility regimes create ‘collateral advantages’ for households and the sector. • Flexible eligibility regimes enable delivery organisations to create more sustainable and holistic interventions. • Partnership and referral work is effective and important as it enables relational efficiency. • Policy design should shift from national targeting to regional capture; from arrows to nets.