By Tom Robins, Chief Executive, Switchee (February 2026)
The UK has spent years debating how to fix cold, damp homes. Yet one of the most effective interventions we’ve seen didn’t involve insulation, retrofitting or new regulations at all. It involved giving people the confidence to turn the heating on, and keep it on, without fear of the bill.
That insight sits at the heart of Warm Rents – a programme, developed with housing providers including Clarion Housing Group, Places for People and Yorkshire Housing, that rethinks how social rent works. Warm Rents starts from a simple principle: when you rent a home, you should be renting a warm home, not a cold one. By building the cost of warmth into the rent itself, it shifts responsibility away from residents having to manage unpredictable heating bills, and instead treats warmth as a basic, expected part of the home.
The need for change is clear. Fuel poverty remains persistent in social housing, with around one in thirteen social homes affected last winter. These are not marginal cases, but the predictable outcome of a system that separates housing from warmth and treats heating as optional rather than essential.
Every winter, the same pattern follows. Residents ration heat, close off rooms and make trade-offs no one should have to make to live safely. By the time spring arrives, the damage – to health, finances and the property – has already been done.
Fuel poverty is often described as a technical problem, something to be solved through insulation, more efficient energy sources and Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings. Those things matter. But focusing on them alone obscures a harder truth: fuel poverty is ultimately about people, not properties. It is about whether residents feel able to heat their homes to a healthy level without fear of the cost.
What is striking is how little our housing system acknowledges this reality. Social rent formulas are carefully calibrated to incomes, values and inflation, yet take almost no account of the cost of heating a home to a healthy temperature. In effect, we regulate rent affordability while ignoring heat affordability — even though warmth is as fundamental to a decent home as the walls that surround it.
This separation between housing and warmth is not inevitable. Other countries take a different approach. In Sweden, heating is typically included in rent, with minimum temperature standards enforced as a matter of course. Despite a much colder climate, this has effectively eliminated fuel poverty in public rental housing.
Switchee worked alongside Places for People, Yorkshire Housing and Clarion Housing Group on a programme that explored this issue from a different starting point. Instead of beginning with the building, it began with warmth itself.
Through the Warm Rents programme, households received targeted support to maintain healthy indoor temperatures – around 18 degrees during the day and 16 degrees at night. This support was delivered through direct-to-device energy vouchers, sent straight to residents’ Switchee devices. The vouchers were explicitly intended to cover the cost of heating, giving residents the confidence to keep their homes warm without worrying about unaffordable bills.
Crucially, there were no changes to the fabric of the homes. No insulation upgrades. No retrofit works. The only intervention was enabling residents to heat their homes properly and consistently.
The impact was rapid and measurable. Average indoor temperatures increased and stabilised across participating homes. Heating patterns shifted away from short, reactive bursts towards steadier, healthier use.
Most importantly, moisture levels fell. Across the homes monitored, average relative humidity dropped by more than six percentage points, materially reducing the risk of damp and mould. Homes that had previously sat above the 60% humidity threshold associated with mould were brought back into a safer range.
This matters because damp and mould are not random failures of buildings. They are often the visible consequence of chronic under-heating. By the time mould appears on walls and ceilings, the damage has already been done. Warm Rents shows that tackling fuel poverty directly can interrupt this cycle before harm sets in.
Behind those numbers sit real experiences. One resident described spending winters “sitting in my flat wearing three jumpers,” while another spoke of not knowing how they would afford to keep warm until the voucher arrived and, in their words, “it felt like someone actually cared. Not just about bills, but about how we’re living.” The change was not just warmer homes, but dignity, trust and relief.
This experience points to a broader question about how we think about housing costs in the UK. We have drawn a hard line between rent and energy, treating heating as a variable cost that households must manage alone, regardless of how efficient, or inefficient, a property is.
The future of rent should reflect the true cost of living in a home. Where properties are poorly insulated and expensive to heat, rents should be lower to reflect those unavoidable energy costs. Where homes are efficient, warm and cheap to run, rents can justifiably be higher. That shift would protect tenants while creating a powerful incentive for landlords to invest in energy efficiency – not just to meet standards, but because warmer homes would directly support rental value.
Warm Rents offers a glimpse of how this could work in practice: aligning rent, energy and wellbeing so that residents are not forced to choose between heating and hardship. As the government looks to upgrade millions of homes through the Warm Homes Plan and the proposed Warm Homes Agency, this people-first logic must sit alongside retrofit programmes.
Warm homes should not be an aspiration. They should be the baseline. And if we are willing to rethink how rent reflects the real cost of warmth, that baseline is not only achievable – it is long overdue.
