‘This cannot be a Whitehall knows best agenda.’ With that line at Manchester Central on 25 June, Energy Consumers Minister Martin McCluskey tried to plant the Warm Homes Plan firmly outside Westminster, telling the Housing 2026 conference that councils and mayoral authorities will have to lead if ministers are serious about fixing cold, damp and costly homes. He used the speech to set out the government’s £15 billion programme of insulation, solar panels, batteries and heat pumps, with a target of upgrading up to 5 million homes by 2030. (gov.uk) For Northern readers, that was the line worth clocking. This was sold as local delivery, not London instruction. McCluskey chose Manchester for the speech and argued that housing quality, fuel poverty and energy security meet in the same places that have lived with ageing stock and high bills for years, from Rochdale to Blackpool and across city regions trying to make retrofit work on real streets. (gov.uk)

He brought some biography to it. McCluskey told the conference he grew up in a council flat in Greenock shared by three generations of his family over nearly 70 years, and said that experience shaped his view of what a secure home can do for a child’s life chances. Before Parliament, he said, he dealt with poverty and deprivation as a local councillor. (gov.uk) That personal note matters because ministers often talk about housing as units, targets and pipelines. In Manchester he tried to frame it instead as dignity, warmth and public health, saying children are still turning up at school cold and families are still stuck in homes where damp and mould are not an inconvenience but a danger. The Warm Homes Plan itself makes the same case, linking cold homes to respiratory and cardiovascular illness and warning about the cost to the NHS of poor housing. (gov.uk)

The numbers back up the urgency. Official figures published in March put final 2024 fuel poverty in England at 9.9 per cent, or 2.47 million households, while the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero says 2025 is projected lower at 9.4 per cent, or 2.36 million. Even with that improvement, Yorkshire and the Humber still had one of the highest regional fuel poverty rates in 2024 at 11.3 per cent, and the North West sat slightly above the national average. (assets.publishing.service.gov.uk) That is why Awaab Ishak still hangs over any ministerial housing speech in the North. The two-year-old died in 2020 after exposure to mould in his Rochdale home. Awaab’s Law came into force on 27 October 2025, bringing legal deadlines for social landlords to investigate and fix serious hazards, and Manchester City Council’s own advice pages still spell out the basic truth too many tenants know already: poor insulation, weak ventilation and inadequate heating help drive condensation and black mould. (gov.uk)

McCluskey’s offer was big on scale. The Warm Homes Plan promises £15 billion of public investment over this Parliament, with more than £5 billion aimed at low-income households, a new Warm Homes Fund worth £5.3 billion overall, £1.7 billion within that for consumer loans, and a target to triple the number of homes with solar by putting panels on up to 3 million rooftops by 2030. Ministers also want more than 450,000 heat pump installations a year and say the wider programme could support up to 180,000 extra jobs by the end of the decade. (gov.uk) On standards, the speech repeated the government’s plan for rented homes to reach EPC C by 2030 and for non-domestic buildings to reach EPC B by 2031, while new homes are meant to come with solar, cleaner heating and better insulation as the default rather than the upgrade. Alongside that sits the Renters’ Rights Act, which took effect on 1 May 2026, and the new Decent Homes Standard policy that ministers say will apply across both social and private rented housing from 2035. (gov.uk)

The part that will matter most in northern town halls was McCluskey’s insistence that delivery cannot be run from Whitehall. The Warm Homes Plan says low-income grant support will initially flow through the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund and Warm Homes: Local Grant, building on the government’s £1.3 billion commitment to Wave 3 of the social housing fund. The policy paper says extra 2026/27 funding takes total low-income grant support for that year to £754 million, with ministers planning to move towards a single area-based scheme later in the Parliament. (gov.uk) One point does need tidying up. The published speech transcript refers to ‘295 billion pounds’ of additional 2026/27 funding through the social housing fund, but the Warm Homes Plan itself sets out those allocations in millions and says the extra support takes the 2026/27 low-income homes line to £754 million. That kind of detail matters because councils and housing associations need something firmer than applause lines when they are planning works programmes and budgets. (gov.uk)

Greater Manchester already has skin in the game. RetrofitGM says the city-region is putting £27 million into Green Homes Grant work this year for fuel-poor homes, and argues a greener economy could create or secure more than 256,000 jobs by 2038, including 90,000 in retrofit alone. That helps explain why this speech landed better in Manchester than it might have in a Whitehall committee room: the region has already started building the local capacity ministers say they want to back. (greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk) There is a manufacturing story in this too, and it is not all somewhere else. In the Warm Homes Plan, ministers point to Ideal Heating in Hull and sister firm Gledhill in Blackpool as proof that housing policy can support northern industry as well as cut bills. Ideal Heating chief operations officer Jason Speedy called the investment a ‘built-in-Britain partnership’, with Hull set to scale up heat pump production and Blackpool due to manufacture 120,000 pre-plumbed hot water cylinders a year. (gov.uk)

For northern manufacturers, installers and colleges, that is the bit to watch just as closely as the grants. If the supply chain is local, the money circles locally. If it is not, the North gets the disruption of policy change without enough of the skilled work, wages and apprenticeship routes that are supposed to come with it. The government says it wants 70 per cent of heat pumps sold in the UK to be made in the UK and is backing that with a record £90 million in investment grants. (gov.uk) Still, there is a difference between a strong speech and a finished policy. McCluskey acknowledged that trust has been damaged by past scheme failures including ECO4 and the Great British Insulation Scheme, and that ministers now want a new Warm Homes Agency plus tighter consumer protection. The government says the Warm Homes Plan could lift up to 1 million households out of fuel poverty by 2030. In the North, where Blackpool is among the councils with the highest fuel poverty rates in England and Yorkshire remains above the national average, that promise will be tested against what turns up on the street, not what was said from a stage in Manchester. (gov.uk)