Accelerating carbon emissions reduction across public sector buildings, sites and estates… with simplicity, speed and scale

Who should use this guidance?

This Public Sector Decarbonisation Guidance was commissioned by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), formerly the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), and the Government Property Function to help public sector bodies and their decarbonisation partners understand the best route to Net Zero. We aim to help deliver decarbonisation projects at scale, as well as support grant funding applications, to enable rapid progress on reducing carbon emissions.

This guidance takes learnings from the award-winning Modern Energy Partners (MEP) programme and expertise from across Energy Systems Catapult to provide guidance on heat decarbonisation and energy management.

MEP was a £12.4 million collaborative, cross-departmental innovation programme led by Energy Systems Catapult and funded through BEIS’s Energy Innovation Portfolio. The programme was overseen by BEIS and the Cabinet Office, with additional match funding from the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence, and NHS pathfinder sites.

Focusing on learning-by-doing, MEP carried out specific activities to generate consistent, repeatable approaches for scalable delivery of decarbonisation, taking into account whole system thinking on high energy using campus-style sites.

What is the challenge for the UK Public Sector to reach Net Zero?

With more than 300,000 individual properties, at a combined value of £515 billion, the UK public sector manages, by some distance, the largest property portfolio in the country. The Central Government estate alone has an estimated value of £157.6 billion, with an annual running cost of £21.7 billion. Public sector buildings are responsible for around 2% of the total UK greenhouse gas emissions.

While the UK government has made good progress in decarbonising its operations – reducing emissions by 57% by 2020-2021 compared to 2009-2010, and with an estimated 38% of this reduction due to improved management of the estate – there is still more to be done.

The Greening Government Commitments set out the actions UK government departments and their partner organisations will take to reduce their impacts on the environment in the period 2021 to 2025. The Greening Government Commitments set individual departmental emissions reduction targets, driving action and helping the UK government meet its overall Net Zero target.

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