FEATURE: SUSTAINABILITY
analysis that does rightly belong in-house. But that situation probably applies to other aspects of MAT life too, which is presumably one reason why MATs are so often growing in size: economies of scale matter.
So why might this be a blessing in disguise?
Two reasons, both relating to budgeting clarity: • Under the LCSF regime, MATs – not unreasonably – hoped for a grant to be allocated to pay for the engineering work needed to underpin a PSDS application. Then they waited some months for the result and only had a 1 in 7 chance of success. That option has now gone, so MATs that want to get on with estate decarbonisation will have to find the funds to pay for the feasibility work required to prepare a credible PSDS application for their selected sites: yes, this is another call on the budget, but at least they are back in control of their net-zero destiny and don’t have the prospect of entering the grant lottery that the LCSF had become.
for at least the next year. After all, the theory was that the LCSF-funded heat decarbonisation plans (HDP) were an essential precursor to being able to submit a credible and competitive application for the PSDS, which pays for the bulk of the capital works required to implement the schemes assessed and designed in the preceding HDPs. I was also taken aback by the way in which the news had been promulgated: no consultation with those of us at the coalface of delivering HDPs for schools and MATs, whether on the client side or the consultant side. The cancellation came seemingly out of the blue; and it was late in the day. And nor did I trust the accompanying advice, which implied – in a nutshell – that those who had been intending to bid for LCSF6 would still be able to get much of the support the LCSF was supposed to deliver, but from a range of other sources.
Two weeks later, with colleagues and I having delved further, that reaction is only partly justified. The abruptness of the announcement was clearly ‘unfortunate, Minister’, as Sir Humphrey might have put it. Furthermore, aspects of the announcement do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, erstwhile would-be LCSF applicants are steered towards their local net-zero hubs and the Salix LCSF5 Skills area as alternative sources of support. But in practice neither of these will provide the support required. Regional hubs are not resourced to provide the breadth and depth of engineering support and commercial advice that schools could reasonably have expected from their LCSF consultants. Likewise, whilst the Salix website offers excellent advice and helpful templates, for anything other than the early stages of the LCSF5 HDP scope of work one needs to be an expert to make best use of those templates: in short, it is not reasonable to expect a non-engineer to be able to complete engineering tasks, no matter how well the user handbook has been written.
However, there is another side to this coin. Feedback from the Treasury is that only 20% of the successful PSDS4 applicants had previously made use of the LCSF. That’s a national ratio across the public sector and probably does not reflect the ratio for schools and colleges,
June 2025
but it’s telling. It’s hard for anyone to argue that the LCSF is essential for net-zero progress in the public sector if 80% of the latest PSDS intake has come in via a different route. I also checked the ratio amongst the PSDS4 applicants we are supporting in ReEnergise. We had a 100% success rate for education sector clients applying to PSDS4, but the majority of those applications were based on previous HDP work self-funded by the clients, rather than LCSF funding. So, it seems the Treasury logic is right. So what? What should schools or MATs do in the absence of the LCSF? First: don’t despair. It’s not all over. Trusts will undoubtedly need to self-fund a degree of technical preparation work by external engineers, in order to develop credible, comprehensive and competitive PSDS applications. A balance will need to be struck between the funding trusts can allocate to this endeavour, the cost of the work required on a given site to get to the depth required for a credible PSDS application, and the suitability of that site in terms of grant carbon cost. That relationship looks like this:
• Wise consultants will be prepared to strike deals to help clients get to the PSDS application stage, secure in the knowledge that the funding for the work is under the client MAT’s control, rather than being subject to the LCSF lottery.
Time will tell! And of course, there is lots of good work that can be done in-house, without needing experts and specialists – but that’s another article.
Nigel@reenergisegroup.com
www.reenergisegroup.com
Intuitively I suspect that the new regime probably favours the larger MATs, because there will be relatively more funds available to allocate to the work required in a larger group than in small MATs. Plus, assuming some economies of scale within MAT staff, there will be more staff available to do the aspects of the
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