Home Energy Advice Research

Description

**Please note this is an Award Notice not a call for competition** This contract has been awarded via Energy and Climate Change Behavioural Science Framework Agreement. Reference: CR20116. Background To achieve the UK's net zero target, virtually all homes need to be decarbonised by 2050. A critical part of delivering this will be ensuring homeowners have access to independent, trusted, and accessible advice on options available to them to improve the energy performance of their home and transition to low carbon heat. Whilst there is a lot of information available, it can be conflicting, misleading, lack impartiality, and is not sufficiently tailored to their homes. In addition, consumers may be more at risk of detriment through poor quality installations if they do not know how to access suitably trained and trusted installers. Simple Energy Advice (SEA) is a government-endorsed website designed to provide impartial advice to home energy consumers and is exempt from GOV.UK. The Government Digital Service (GDS) has recently concluded that the exemption will be revoked and at least some of the content on SEA should sit on GOV.UK, and SEA should be closed within 12 months. We are conducting user-testing (discovery phase) to understand if there is still user-need for digital advice and information and this will provide the basis for future decisions on where the tailored advice tools on SEA are hosted: on GOV.UK or a third-party website. Concurrently we wish to explore if this needs to be supplemented with other sources of advice and information. We need to understand the role of government in the advice landscape or if the market is better placed to deliver this.

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