The Modern Energy Partners (MEP) programme (2018 to 2021) was coordinated and delivered by the Sites team at Energy Systems Catapult, drawing on analytical and technical expertise alongside cross-industry partners including Aecom, Atkins, Buro Happold, Ricardo, and Stantec. Funded by BEIS and supported by the Office of Government Property (OGP) and the Government Property Function (GPF), MEP demonstrated best practices for decarbonising public sector buildings.

To ensure the learnings from MEP were embedded, there have been four further years of work partnering with the Public Sector Decarbonisation Strategy Team at DESNZ. This work has been called The Benefits Maximisation Programme or ‘Ben Max’. This work has also continued to be supported by OGP and GPF.

The public facing output of the Ben Max programme is the Public Sector Decarbonisation Guidance (PSDG), a set of free-to-download guides, tools and templates developed by the Catapult and hosted on the Catapult’s website. As well as creating and updating, the guides, tools and checklists, the Ben Max programme also includes:

• Support on policy development of the two key grant funding schemes (the LCSF and the PSDS) alongside DESNZ.
• Support for a small number of public sector organisations and sites (in addition to providing the guides, tools and checklists) to progress more challenging decarbonisation projects.

This piece of work evaluates the impact the Catapult’s work has had in this area.

The challenge

Public sector buildings account for just 2–3% of the UK’s total emissions, yet they present a unique opportunity for government to lead by example, stimulate supply chains and build capacity across the wider built environment. The Committee on Climate Change has called for a comprehensive, long-term programme to support this effort.

The UK’s 2021 Net Zero Strategy mandates a 75% reduction in direct emissions from public sector buildings by 2037. A huge part of achieving this will be decarbonising heat in public sector buildings. The Heat and Buildings Strategy (2021) outlined the then government’s approach to tackle emissions from the built environment including the public sector. The government has historically set specific emission reduction targets for individual central government departments in the Greening Government Commitments.

While previous government policy evolved over time regarding low carbon heating, one of the Committee on Climate Change’s priority actions remains to ‘introduce a comprehensive programme for decarbonisation of public sector buildings, backed by long term funding’. The new government has focused on ‘making Britain a clean energy superpower’.

The solution

The PSDG launched in March 2023 and is centred around seven themes. The themes help the public sector to decarbonise by taking users from setting out an initial decarbonisation strategy, through design and feasibility, procurement, and securing funding, all the way to installation and monitoring of emissions savings from their programme. The reason themes were chosen rather that steps in a process or something similar is that although there is a logical start and progression to setting up and running a high-quality decarbonisation programme, it is likely that work will happen across different themes simultaneously.

For example, organisations should be thinking about funding options whilst developing their strategy. Since launch the suite has been expanded, based on stakeholder need, to encompass over 50 guides, tools, specifications and templates, as well as eight case studies containing practical learnings from the MEP programme.

In addition to the Ben Max Programme, we are also supporting public sector organisations to think more strategically about the challenges they face and help them address barriers, examples of work of this type includes:

1. Working with NHS England to develop a ground source heat pump screening tool, to help drive forward all NHS sites in their decarbonisation journeys, aiming to increase the number of GSHP installations that are often the best technology for large sites such as NHS Trusts.
2. Working with the Office of Government Property (OGP) to design and build a bespoke tool that would enable government departments and OGP to collect consistent high-quality data about central Government buildings, their energy use and emissions for the first time, and provide departments and the OGP a tool to consistently analyse that data. The aim was that the tool would enable departments to understand their route to a Net Zero estate more clearly, and furnish the OGP with the aggregated data, supporting their strategic thinking at the heart of government.
3. Working with NHS England as the first pilot for InSite. The InSite platform seeks to address the challenges of decarbonising non-domestic and public sector buildings by connecting building and site data, live energy data and project data (i.e. data about decarbonisation measures that are either planned or implemented) into one platform for the first time. Through the initial pilot, 74 NHS Trusts (over a third of the total) signed up and has supported those Trusts by producing analysis and comparison of energy data to a greater degree of detail than has previously been possible, but also significantly improves the data NHS England has available in developing its Net Zero strategy

Impact

Our peer-reviewed evaluation found that: PSDG created and disseminated by the Catapult through the Ben Max programme, is reaching (whether those engaging with the guidance are from the relevant audiences, rather than claiming to have reached any specific percentage of the public sector) high impact audiences (the relevant individuals with power to effect change in emissions (through commissioning or delivering decarbonisation projects), in organisations in areas of the public sector with high baseline emissions) within the public sector. Those audiences, and sector leaders, think the PSDG is high quality.

This is in part due to:

• the Catapult’s in-depth knowledge of the technical aspects of decarbonisation;
• the Catapult’s in-depth understanding of the barriers facing the sector and
• other leading organisations having partnered with the Catapult.

The Catapult has been able to effectively support policy makers in public sector decarbonisation.

The evaluation found that there was moderate evidence that:

1. Using PSDG is improving the confidence, capacity and capability in progressing decarbonisation projects, of those high impact audiences
2. Using PSDG is leading to higher quality applications to the government’s grant funding schemes (LCSF and PSDS).
3. The Catapult has been able to effectively support individual public sector organisations with decarbonisation planning and delivery.

We found limited evidence to suggest these things were not true, but in carrying out a robust evaluation we needed to find evidence at scale from a number of sources to ensure its credibility.

Based on all the above, we believe there are leading indicators that the Catapult’s work will lead to faster emissions reductions in the public sector estate, and in a more cost-effective way, than would otherwise be the case – where lower quality projects might be funded, and would be more likely to fail during delivery.

Next steps

This piece of work forms part of the Catapult’s evaluation framework. We have also completed evaluations on our impact on Open Data, our impact on Electricity Market Reform, and our impact on SME growth. We plan to evaluate other areas of Catapult activity using a contribution analysis approach; as well as carrying out further econometric analysis to understand our impact with SMEs.