The LEAD toolkit is a shared resource for local authorities, community groups, and advice organisations, providing best practices for offering in-person local energy and retrofit advice to hard-to-reach groups and hard-to-treat homes.
Resource
What is the LEAD Toolkit?
The South West Net Zero Hub worked with the six projects involved to create a shared learning toolkit of resources as a legacy of the programme.
This toolkit is aimed at local authorities, community energy groups, and advice organisations.
It provides insight into each of the pilot projects and evidenced best practice for delivering in-person local energy and retrofit advice to local communities. The projects focused on:
- Audiences most likely to benefit from in-person advice, such as offline and hard-to-reach consumers.
- Homes that are harder to retrofit, such as traditional and listed buildings, and homes in conservation areas.
The projects were funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) and funding was delivered in partnership with the five regional Local Net Zero Hubs. This LEAD Toolkit focuses on the work carried out by the South West Net Zero Hub.
The LEAD (Local Energy Advice Demonstrator) programme closed on 31 March 2025.
What’s included?
View the resources below to find out what lessons were learnt regarding effective ways to provide in-person advice to local communities on energy and retrofit, and how you and your local authority could replicate these methods across your own hard-to-reach groups and hard-to-treat homes.
Guide: Getting started in retrofit advice
This guide draws on what was learnt from the LEAD projects in the South West, with the aim of helping to shape domestic retrofit services for local authorities and community groups.
ResourceReport: The LEAD National Conference
This report explains the experiences and knowledge shared among LEAD project partners during an event held in Birmingham on 1 April 2025.
Project summaries
We have a collection of LEAD project summaries of the six projects that were worked on during the LEAD programme, which delve into the activities involved and the lessons learnt for each project:
- Accelerate
- EnergyWise
- Far South West Retrofit
- Futureproof Wiltshire
- Green Heritage Homes
- Green Open Homes West
Case StudyMethod summaries
The previous six projects are accompanied by a collection of LEAD method summaries, which explain the various methods used across these case studies.
The methods that emerged were:
- Community champions
- Community outreach
- Expert Q&A
- Home visits
- Level 0 listed building consent pre-application advice
- Multi-stage advice
- Not-Yet-Green Open Homes
- Training professionals and communities in retrofit advice
- Youth Action At Home
- Visual and data tools
The method summaries include an abundance of useful information and top tips to help anyone who wishes to use similar methods, and there are a lot of additional resources included too.
CollectionPresentations
This collection of presentations includes three sets of PowerPoint slides that can be used as a template for local authorities to create their own presentations on energy and retrofit-related topics. They also come with useful notes providing suggestions for script prompts.
The presentations are on:
- Audience segmentation
- Designing the retrofit customer journey
- Traditional building retrofit
Guest preview of selected publicly available resources