Britain has spent decades building utility networks that quietly deliver essential services, yet as the country moves away from gas heating, there is no equivalent regional utility for heat.

Our latest white paper argues that the challenge of decarbonising heat is not simply about choosing between technologies such as heat pumps or heat networks. It is about creating the infrastructure and institutions that can connect homes to affordable, reliable and scalable low-carbon heat over the long term. Without a strategic system, responsibility for sourcing, maintaining and replacing heating assets risks being pushed onto individual developments and households instead of being shared across a wider network.

Britain’s Missing Heat Utility explores how regional heat utilities and heat transmission networks could unlock waste heat from data centres, industry, wastewater and other sources that are currently discarded.

By treating heat as a regional infrastructure challenge rather than a collection of isolated building-level decisions, cities and regions can reduce costs, improve resilience, make better use of existing energy resources and create a more flexible pathway to net zero.

Drawing on examples such as Greater Copenhagen and the proposed Manchester Heat Highway, the paper asks a simple but important question: if Britain has the technologies needed to decarbonise heat, what is the utility system that will deliver it?