Winning a Warm Homes: Local Grant allocation is the easy part. The hard part, as every council delivering the scheme discovers, is turning that allocation into completed installations before the money must be spent. And the single biggest bottleneck is rarely the building work. It is finding enough eligible residents who say yes.
The one-line answer: yes. DESNZ’s Warm Homes: Local Grant policy guidance (July 2026) lets local authorities spend up to 15% of project funding on administration, and that explicitly includes searching for eligible homes and signing up households.
The short answer: yes, and the guidance says so
The scheme’s policy guidance from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (updated July 2026) allows local authorities to spend up to 15% of their funding on administration, and that provision includes the work of identifying and signing up eligible residents. In other words, resident finding is not an overhead you must absorb elsewhere. It is a legitimate, funded part of delivering the scheme.
That matters because under-delivery is usually a pipeline problem, not a funding problem. An allocation with no queue of verified, willing households behind it is a spreadsheet, not a programme.
Why resident finding falls through the gap
Most councils are set up to assess applications, not to generate them. The households who stand to benefit most are often the least likely to respond to a council letter: they may be wary of anything that sounds like a scheme, unsure whether they qualify, or simply never see the communication. Meanwhile eligibility rules are detailed enough that a well-meaning campaign can generate hundreds of enquiries from people who were never going to qualify, which consumes officer time and erodes trust when they have to be turned away.
The honest framing matters too. Nobody can promise a resident funding before their circumstances and property have been assessed. Good resident-finding always says “you may qualify, let’s check”, never “you will get this”.
What a working resident pipeline looks like
From the programmes we have worked on, the pipelines that fill share a few habits:
Targeting before broadcasting. Start from the areas and property types most likely to qualify, rather than borough-wide mailouts, so the enquiries that come in are worth an assessor’s time.
A simple first step. An eligibility check a resident can do in a minute (a postcode checker, a short form, a phone call) beats a long application form. The check filters honestly: it tells people who clearly will not qualify early, and moves people who may qualify into a proper assessment.
A local, human follow-up. Residents commit when a real person they can meet answers their questions. Programmes run entirely at arm’s length see far more drop-off between “interested” and “installed”.
One owner for the journey. When resident finding, assessment and installation sit with different organisations that do not talk to each other, households fall between them. The fewer handoffs, the more installations an allocation produces.
Where a delivery partner fits
This is work an installation partner can carry as part of the delivery relationship. We do it for the local authorities we deliver for: helping fill the programme with residents who may qualify, running the eligibility check up front (our Warm Homes: Local Grant postcode checker is a live example), and keeping households engaged through assessment to installation, with an employed local site manager on every project, because that is how we run all our work.
Pyramid Eco has been retrofitting homes since 2011. We are TrustMark registered and PAS 2030 certified, working to PAS 2035, and we deliver Warm Homes: Local Grant measures (solid wall, cavity and loft insulation, ventilation, heat pumps and solar) across London and the South East as a subcontracting partner to councils and their main contractors. For the full picture of how we work with local authorities, see our WHLG delivery partner guide.
Questions councils ask about funded resident finding
Can Warm Homes: Local Grant funding pay for finding eligible residents?
Yes. The DESNZ policy guidance (July 2026) allows up to 15% of project spend on administration, explicitly including searching for eligible homes and signing up households.
Who is eligible for the Warm Homes: Local Grant?
Homes rated EPC D to G that are owner-occupied or privately rented, where the resident meets one of three pathways: living in an IMD income decile 1 or 2 postcode, receiving specified means-tested benefits, or a gross household income under £36,000. Final verification always sits with the local authority, and nobody can promise a resident funding before assessment.
Can a contractor run resident finding for a council compliantly?
Yes, inside the delivery relationship. Each lead should be handed over with its eligibility evidence attached, so the council’s duty to verify is met with checks rather than self-declarations.
If your allocation is ahead of your pipeline, we should talk. Talk to us about how resident finding can sit inside a delivery partnership, funded the way the guidance intends.
Source: Warm Homes: Local Grant policy guidance, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, July 2026.
