Warm Home Prescription® (WHP)  – an innovative new service pioneered by Energy Systems Catapult – helps the UK’s most vulnerable stay warm and well, and out of hospital. In summer 2023, the team behind WHP set out to understand whether providing longer-term solutions through energy efficiency measures and low carbon heating improvements, could produce sustainable warm home outcomes for householders. 92 residents in Aberdeen and Teesside who had previously received credit on their energy bills via Warm Home Prescription, this time received home energy improvements.

Key findings:

• People understand that achieving healthy temperatures is important because of the impact of experiencing a warm home outcome with a WHP of credit the previous year. Home energy improvements gave people confidence they would achieve healthy temperatures in winter 2023/24 and 81% thought they did at the end of the winter.
• Where people intentionally reduced their heat use to control costs, they reported reducing the number of heating hours rather than the temperature.
• From the available sample (n = 68), just over half of people that had home energy improvements achieved healthy temperatures above 18 degrees Celsius for most of the time.
• Most of that sample of people did not put their health at extreme risk, as temperatures above 16 degrees Celsius were achieved almost all the time.
• Of the same sample above (n=68), half of them achieved healthy temperatures across both winters (phase 1, 2022/23 and phase 2, 2023/24).
• Some people weren’t clear up front on what measures they would receive and therefore what the benefits would be, which prevented some from taking up the offer.
• Controls that are easy to use and make it easy to understand temperatures in different rooms are important to people and could drive uptake of WHP and help them achieve healthy temperatures with confidence.