Current Policy Recommendations

July 2025

These recommendations are grouped under the following headings: Funding and Growth, Supportive Policies, and Other policies.

Funding and Growth

  1. Secure government funding for the transition from the Community Energy Fund (CEF), now known as the GBE Community Fund (GBECF), to the Local Power Plan (LPP), sufficient to enable Community Energy to grow without hindrance, e.g., £30m for this financial year. The sector needs to return to doubling in size every year to reach the government’s 8GW local and community energy target. See our news piece on the allocation of £5m for this year to the GBECF.
  2. Get clarity around LPP objectives and mechanisms and ensure the LPP is about "more than generation."
  3. Ensure community energy is included in relevant policy and funding provisions across government, e.g.
    1. the Warm Homes Plan (and future rounds of other funding such as the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS)) references the importance of community energy, enables community energy to access funding and recommends that funded projects collaborate with community energy
  4. Ensure Community Energy collaboration is retrospectively built into current capital funding including the £180m allocated to rooftop solar and £630m to PSDS.
  5. Open up the Energy Redress ’Main Fund’ to community businesses and introduce financial support to enable smaller businesses to access it.
  6. Tax relief: reinstate eligibility of ‘community energy generation’ for the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS).

Supportive Policies

Policy recommendations are gathered under the following policy areas

  1. Routes to Market:
    1. Ofgem to sign off P441.
    2. A price stability mechanism is introduced (e.g., Community CfD, Community Export Guarantee or floor price).
    3. Local supply is built into REMA.
  2. Shared Ownership: (see CEE/CES/CEW briefing)
    1. Mandatory offer of 20% ownership share to communities.
    2. Incentives (benefits) to developers (e.g., CfD uplift, planning, grid connection).
  3. Grid connections: 
    1. NESO includes community energy as a "designation" for prioritizing grid access in recognition of the ‘significant additional consumer, net zero and/or wider economic and/or societal benefits’ it offers (see NESO’s recommended Project Designation Methodology - p45).
  4. Capacity Building: 
    1. Ensure the Energy Learning Network receives long-term support.
    2. Long-term core funding is provided for Community Energy Networks (CEE, CES, CEW) to support capacity building and facilitate growth of the sector.
    3. A hub and spoke model for knowledge sharing is developed where hubs of specialist knowledge are resourced to share through local spokes (within other CE organisations of NZ Hubs).
  5. Planning: 
    1. Add net zero test to NPPF (as promised in Labour’s Clean Energy Mission p8).
    2. Include community ownership as a ‘material consideration’.
    3. Under specific circumstances, enable community energy development on the green belt.
  6. Local Authority Collaboration: 
    1. DESNZ/GBE to encourage, incentivise, mandate, and create conditionality for local authority collaboration in LPP funding. 
    2. MHCLG to encourage local authorities to collaborate with and procure from Community Energy.
    3. MHCLG to clarify public sector procurement rules and enable social value to be factored in.

Other policy

  1. Ethical sourcing: Enable community energy to continue its lead “ensuring that slavery and human trafficking is not taking place in its business or supply chains” (recent amendment to the GBE Act).
  2. Benefits of Community Energy: Ensure that social value is well captured and built into policy, regulation, and funding.
  3. Law Commission coop consultation: Ensure that Law Commission reform and FCA regulation supports the growth of Community Energy.

For a site visit and policy meeting with Minister for Consumers, Miatta Fahnbulleh MP, on 18 July 2025, CEE updated its Policy Recommendations in relation to heat, energy efficiency and advice. These were created in consultation with CEE's Energy Efficiency and Community Heat Working Groups and will be the subject of ongoing policy discussion with the Minister.

If you have comments or suggestions please email Duncan and Josh.