Without proper price protection, working class tenants are being burdened with exorbitant costs.
Skyrocketing charges for heating and hot water from council heat networks in Lambeth, south London, are to be challenged at a judicial review by two tenants.
Kirsty Oliveira’s heating charges rose four-fold in the year from 2022, and Aida Haile’s more than doubled. Lambeth Tenants Heat Campaign and Fuel Poverty Action are supporting Kirsty and Aida.
Jeremy Ogilvie-Harris, a barrister at the Public Interest Law Centre, will represent them at the hearing that begins on Tuesday, 1 December 2026.
READ: DECARBONISING OUR HOMES
Atmosphere
When Richard Clayton KC, sitting as a deputy high court judge in June, gave the go-ahead for the judicial review, he said the claim raises “wider issues and points of law of general public importance”.
The case highlights the scandal of extortionate charges, poor customer service, waste, inefficiency and breakdowns faced by up to 900,000 British households that rely on heat networks.
Buildings served by the networks have heat and/or hot water piped to them from a centralised boiler, and no gas boiler of their own. Such networks commonly serve whole neighbourhoods, and even whole cities, across Europe.
Heat networks have big potential for helping to tackle climate change. They can take in heat from underground, from rivers or disused coal mines, or heat that is currently dumped into the atmosphere, such as from power stations or industrial processes.
They can be integrated with large-scale heat storage, and adapted to switch to cooling in hot weather.
Unregulated
As part of its Warm Homes Plan, the British Government wants to more than double heat network annual output, from 12.4 terawatts (TWh) to 27 TWh, by 2035.
But poor service and underinvestment has to be tackled, campaigners say, otherwise expanding heat networks will multiply problems, not solve them.
The first step must be to ensure that existing networks deliver a service no more expensive, and no less reliable, than gas boilers and electricity, consumer advocates argue.
Kirsty and Aida’s case against Lambeth highlights the lack of choice for council tenants on heat networks.
They are obliged to buy hot water and heating whatever the price – which is unregulated, unlike gas and electricity prices. They cannot install their own boiler or heat pump, or switch providers.
Unenforceable
Neither Kirsty or Aida, nor thousands of others, have meters for heating and hot water. Government rules requiring that they are installed have not been followed. Using less, or even no, heat makes no difference to the bill.
Without proper price protection, working class tenants are being burdened with exorbitant costs.
Kirsty and Aida are both secure tenants, who have been allocated social housing through the council’s duties regarding homelessness. So they had little choice about where to live.
But, because welfare benefits do not cover heating and hot water, after the 2023 price hike Kirsty faced a monthly shortfall of about £350. For Aida it was about £300.
Both women face a risk of eviction, and are unable to leave their homes as they would then be declared “intentionally homeless”.
They are asking the judicial review to rule that their tenancy agreements are “unfair and unenforceable”, and that Lambeth council pay damages.
Protection
Kirsty Oliveira said: “Lambeth as a whole, both elected councillors and officials, has been a big disappointment.
“We went to councillors’ surgeries, sent them letters and emails, and arranged meetings with them. They told us ‘no-one will get evicted’, but refused our requests to put that in writing.
“We have asked why the heat charges are bundled in with the rent. This is unfair, and it’s not transparent. We don’t have a choice: we can not even save money by turning it off.”
Sam Tippet of the Public Interest Law Centre said: “This case is vital for social housing tenants on heat networks across the country.
"Without proper price protection, working class tenants are being burdened with exorbitant costs and pushed into unmanageable debts.”
Decarbonise
The problems Kirsty and Aida have faced – steep price increases, lack of flexibility, and poor service – are all too common. Until January this year, heat networks were exempt from oversight by Ofgem, the government’s energy regulator, and that made matters worse.
Ofgem can hold electricity suppliers and generators to legal standards, and has since 2018 imposed price caps on gas and electricity – but not on network heat.
Finally, after years of pressure from Citizens Advice, the Competitions and Markets Authority and others, the government empowered Ofgem to monitor heat networks, starting in January this year.
But consumer advocates say Ofgem does not have the teeth needed to do the job.
Stephen Knight of Heat Trust told The Ecologist: “Heat networks are the obvious way to decarbonise urban heating at scale. But we have to change the existing consumer experience. It is not good enough, and not reliable enough.”
Standards
The first priority should be technical standards, Knight argues. These exist in draft form, but will not come into force until next year, with the slowdown due in part to “heavy lobbying” by the heat network industry.
Second, Ofgem “doesn’t have the tools in its toolbox to control prices”, Knight warned.
Heat networks are typically operated by landlords, who buy fuel on the wholesale market, unprotected by energy price caps, and pass on the costs to consumers.
Others along the supply chain, such as companies doing maintenance, procurement, or metering and billing services, profit.
Tenants on the Wyndham, Brandon 2 and Brandon 3 estates in Southwark, the borough next door to Lambeth – served by a heat network – know all about the need for technical standards.
Neglect
Fury over constant heating and hot water outages, damp, mould, overheating and delayed or cancelled repairs brought 60 of them together at a recent public meeting to launch the Wyndham Heat Network Action Group. They are calling on Southwark council to work with a resident-led board to oversee repairs and monitor progress.
The group works with the health charity Medact, and is building links with other community bodies, and collecting and coordinating information about impacts on residents.
At the public meeting, Dr Laura-Jane Smith, a respiratory consultant at King’s College Hospital, said homes had been “severely neglected” by landlords, housing associations and councils.
People bring pictures of damp patches and black mould to Smith’s clinic, and “tell me about how it’s completely unbearably hot in summer, freezing in winter. They cough, they wheeze, they can’t breathe.”
One of the action group coordinators, Suzy Murray, said in an interview: “The network is old and we are dealing with the consequences of decades of neglect. Some tenants go for months without heating and hot water. Others suffer extreme overheating.
Consumed
“Three or four years ago, I was not on a heat network, and I was paying £60 a month for electricity, hot water and heat. Now I am paying £150. Heat network users are not protected by Ofgem’s price caps, and the standard of service is shocking.”
Contractors employed by the council to do repairs are a particular problem, Murray said. They frequently botch repairs and fail to keep appointments.
In June the government completed a consultation on how to spend money from its Warm Homes Fund. The Heat Trust urged “investment in heat network remediation works, to address the shocking levels of heat loss, low efficiency and poor reliability on many existing networks”.
Stephen Knight of Heat Trust added that many heat networks, even recently built ones, are technically inefficient.
Some energy content is inevitably lost in processing and transportation, but these losses are up to twice as high as they need be, so that little more than one third of the energy consumed reaches users as heat.
Rife
Heat networks could and should provide heat and hot water, cheap or free, as a public service. But because the sector is in private hands, and regulation is toothless and late to arrive, they are a financial burden on users.
Heat network prices are just too high. Heat Trust estimated last year that many network customers pay double the price at which households can produce heat from a gas boiler (15p/kWh versus 7.5p/kWh).
More than one third of heat network customers – households with an estimated 350,000-plus people – have their heat bills “bundled” with rent and service charges, as Kirsty Oliveira and Aida Haile in Lambeth have.
If they fall behind with payments to landlords or managing agents, they are vulnerable to eviction – and more than 1.2 million people in England and Wales could end up in this situation, if government plans to expand networks go ahead and the rules are not changed, Citizens Advice has warned.
Deceptive and untransparent billing practices are rife. More than half of heat network users do not have their own meter, and, again like Kirsty and Aida, are charged a flat fee whether they use heating and hot water or not.
Jaw-dropping
The regulated system introduced this year provides for a transition to meters, but it is long and slow: retrofitting meters have “high costs” and unmetered customers will “wait a long time” to benefit, Citizens Advice states.
A host of other dodgy practices – retrospective tariff increases, unexplained charges, unaffordable repayment plans, awful customer service – can now be challenged via the regulator, but cynical providers retain the whip hand over vulnerable users, campaigners have warned.
Ruth London of Fuel Poverty Action (FPA) said that people who move to homes supplied by heat networks are told it will save money, and be good for the climate. “Instead, too many find the costs are far more than other households pay, and they can’t even save by switching supplier.”
The injustice is “jaw-dropping”, and “made worse when the system is so inefficient that it isn’t really even ‘green’”, she said.
Afford
The government’s plans to expand heat networks are part of a broader initiative, the Warm Homes Plan, that also provides for installing heat pumps, and retrofitting poorly insulated homes – and claims to right energy injustices and support decarbonisation.
But housing activists, energy researchers and others have warned that the proposals make little to no attempt to deal with the deep-going causes: decades of attacks on the public sector, the privatisation-driven housing crisis and the chronic condition of the construction sector.
It is not only heat network users who suffer “outrages at the hands of profiteering businesses and uncaring bureaucracies”, but also households with heat pumps or insulation retrofits, Ruth London pointed out.
“Many more can’t afford the good quality tech that is cutting bills for the wealthy.”
Warmth
The FPA has also challenged the proposals for “zoning” that are central to the government’s approach to heat networks – but that, if focused on handing the initiative to private companies, could make matters worse.
FPA’s Make Green Fair campaign aims to “ensure that everyone can access low carbon technologies that actually benefit their users”, Ruth London said.
A challenge for all campaigners is to take an integrated view of the problems: the broken housing market that underlies the misery of poor-quality accommodation for millions of people; the destruction of local government provision such as direct labour organisations; and the corporate stranglehold on electricity generation and supply.
The principles of public provision; of warmth and electricity as rights not consumer goods; and of measures to decarbonise that both help tackle climate change and make our lives better can unite powerful alliances to challenge the government’s policy that puts change in the hands of capital and thereby risks failure.
This Author
Dr Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham, a life member of the National Union of Journalists, and author of books on energy systems, Russia and Ukraine. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist and writes a blog at peoplenature.org.
How to make our homes warmer and better, while tackling climate change, will be discussed at the Make Green Fair 2026 conference on Saturday, 19 September 2026, 10.00am to 5.00pm, in Manchester. Kirsty Oliveira will be among the speakers at the event, which is organised by Fuel Poverty Action. The event will aim to answer the questions: “How do we fight for a clean energy system that's fairer than the dirty fossil fueled one it replaces? How do we make sure home retrofits, insulation, heat pumps etc actually bring bills down and make our homes warm and healthy?”
People & Nature pamphlets, downloadable for free: Remaking Home Heating in the UK, Making Homes and Energy Transition in Nigeria and Decarbonising the Built Environment: A Global Overview.
