Public consultation on Warm Healthy Homes Fund opens

The Department for Communities has launched a public consultation on the Warm Healthy Homes Fund, a scheme intended to become its main fuel poverty intervention for private sector dwellings in Northern Ireland from April 2027¹. The consultation is open until 19 August 2026¹.

The Fund is intended to replace the current Affordable Warmth Scheme and to target support at lower-income households in owner-occupied and private rented homes¹. The Department describes it as taking a "whole-house, fabric-first approach to improving home energy performance", with measures designed to improve warmth, health and energy affordability¹. It is intended to support lower-income households who are experiencing, or at risk of, fuel poverty by improving the energy efficiency of homes and making them warmer, healthier and more affordable to heat¹.

"The public consultation on the Warm Healthy Homes Fund has now been launched and is open until 19 August 2026."

The Department states that the Fund forms part of the wider Warm Healthy Homes approach and will help deliver the strategic actions set out in the Warm Healthy Homes Strategy¹. It also reflects lessons learned from the Affordable Warmth Scheme, with development focused on a more streamlined delivery model and a whole-house, fabric-first approach¹. Pre-consultation engagement took place during 2024, when the Home Energy Branch team worked alongside the Fuel Poverty strategy team on workshops and focus groups¹.

The Department has published a high-level timeline for the Fund¹:

A Warm Healthy Homes Fund Project Board, bringing together high-level officials from across government, and a Reference Panel of housing, community, voluntary and retrofit organisations have been established to support development and delivery¹. Organisations represented on the Reference Panel include the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, National Energy Action, Age NI, the Insulation Association of Ireland and the Landlords Association Northern Ireland¹.

Why it matters for households

For households in Northern Ireland in owner-occupied or private rented homes, the Fund is the proposed route by which energy efficiency support for lower-income occupants would be delivered from April 2027, replacing the Affordable Warmth Scheme¹. The stated focus on the whole house and on the building fabric, rather than on individual measures alone, points to a different shape of works from what the current scheme provides, though the Department has not set out in this material which specific measures would be eligible or what grant levels would apply. Those details have not been reported.

The consultation is the stage at which the proposed approach is open to comment before final policy development and scheme design¹. For a household weighing up how its home might be improved, the practical significance is that the design of the successor scheme, including how access is arranged and how delivery is simplified, is still being settled¹. The Department says delivery arrangements are intended to simplify access and support implementation from April 2027¹.

What happens next

Consultation events will be held in Belfast, online and Omagh¹. The Belfast event at NICVA is on 17 June 2026, the online event on Microsoft Teams is on 24 June 2026, and the Omagh event at Omagh Enterprise Centre is on 30 June 2026¹. Registration is through Eventbrite links published by the Department¹. The consultation closes on 19 August 2026, after which responses and stakeholder engagement will be analysed between August and September 2026 to inform final policy development and scheme design¹. Final development, delivery planning and implementation are set out from April 2027¹.

More detail on grants and schemes and on how provision differs across the nations is available, alongside the site's page on Warm Homes, Healthy Futures in Northern Ireland.

Sources1 cited

1. Warm Healthy Homes Fund | Department for Communities, communities-ni.gov.uk