DECARBONISING FOR HOUSING ASSOCIATIONS/SOCIAL HOUSING


COUNCIL HOUSING IS NOW WE NE


Solar panels on a council house roof do more than cut a bill. For a social housing tenant, they can be the difference between heating a home properly through winter and rationing every kilowatt, as Mohamed Gaafar, CEO and co-founder, Gryd, explains


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ocial housing tenants are among the most vulnerable to fuel poverty, with the least ability


to act independently when costs rise. They can’t remortgage to fund an installation, or simply switch tariff their way out of a badly insulated, gas-dependent home. If the energy transition is going to mean anything


for this group, it has to reach the roof over their heads – and increasingly, in parts of the UK, it is. The benefits go beyond the bill itself. Solar gives


tenants a source of electricity that isn’t exposed to the swings of the wholesale market, at a time when volatile prices have been one of the biggest drivers of fuel poverty. And for councils themselves, a decarbonised, higher-EPC-rated housing stock is a direct route to meeting their own net zero and asset management targets.


LOCAL AUTHORITY PERFORMANCE We built the Gryd Council Housing Solar Index


because there was no clear picture of where the UK stood on solar across council housing. Without that visibility, it’s impossible to measure progress or identify where parts of the country might be getting left behind. Compiled from Freedom of Information requests


to local authorities, in the continued absence of any central government dataset, it’s the most


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comprehensive snapshot we have of how local authorities are actually performing. The findings surprised us. Nationally, council


housing trails the private market: 5.8% of council homes have solar, against 7.8% of private ones. But in Wales, 10% of council homes have it, and in Scotland, 8.6% do, both ahead of the private market. Council housing can outperform, and in these two nations, it already does. The regional variation underneath those


figures is striking. North West Wales leads the UK, with one in three council homes now fitted with solar, followed by North East Wales at 21.7% and Aberdeen and North East Scotland at 13%. Southern Wales delivered the most dramatic single-year shift anywhere in the country, rising from 0.3% of council homes – the lowest in the UK – to 8.1%. Scotland’s Highlands and Islands nearly doubled its rate too, from 4.7% to 9%. In England, the East Midlands stands out, with solar-equipped council homes almost doubling in twelve months and accounting for more than a third of all new council installations nationally.


LOCAL AUTHORITY BENEFITS What these leading regions share isn’t better


weather. It’s councils willing to commit to solar ENERGY & SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTIONS - Autumn 2026


at scale. In our experience, local authorities are frequently more ambitious than private developers when it comes to installing larger systems, and Wales and Scotland prove that ambition can translate into results. Part of that comes down to structure. A council is


a single decision-maker for thousands of homes, which means it can commission solar street by street or estate by estate, negotiating one contract instead of thousands of individual ones. Private homeowners don’t have that advantage.


Each one has to independently decide to invest, find the capital, and manage the installation themselves. Council housing stock is also more uniform – more semis, terraces and bungalows with straightforward roofs – which makes it easier to standardise and roll out at pace than the UK’s more varied private housing stock.


FUNDING For most councils, the barrier is rarely a lack of


ambition alone, it is upfront capital, and how best to allocate what is available. Closing that gap is less about any single fix than


a combination of them. The councils making the fastest progress are typically doing three things: treating solar as a rolling, whole-stock programme rather than a series of one-off projects, so they can


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