Phase 5 Public Sector Low Carbon Skills Fund

Yes, buildings that are owned by the eligible public sector application but leased out to a private sector organisation are eligible for funding, unless the lease places responsibility for decarbonisation activities on the private sector organisation.

Privately owned buildings occupied by the eligible public sector application are eligible where these are occupied under a long lease and the terms of the lease do not place responsibility for decarbonisation activities on the private sector. 

To be eligible the lease length must be at least twenty years, or in recognition of varying leasehold arrangements, where your remaining lease is less than twenty years, but you still expect to occupy the building for at least the next twenty years, organisations will be required to provide an explanation of this in the application form. 

The Low Carbon Skills Fund cannot fund social housing projects, with the exception of student accommodation and NHS accommodation. For details on funding available to social housing, please have a look at the housing section of our website.  

VAT that your organisation can reclaim from HMRC is not eligible expenditure under the grant terms and conditions. Therefore, you can only include VAT in the grant value requested, if your organisation cannot reclaim the VAT from HMRC. 

No, applications for buildings where heat decarbonisation has already occurred are not eligible for a HDP consisting of fabric upgrade proposals. 

The Low Carbon Skills Fund provides funding to enable organisations to put in place or improve an existing heat decarbonisation plan that describes how an organisation intends to replace fossil fuel heating systems with low carbon alternatives. 

As set out in the Heat Decarbonisation Project Development Guidance, organisations should take a ‘whole building’ approach and plans should include any measures necessary to enable cost-effective heat decarbonisation. Applications for buildings where heat decarbonisation has already occurred are not eligible for a HDP consisting of fabric upgrade proposals.

The purpose of a heat decarbonisation plan is to describe how an organisation intends to replace fossil fuel heating systems with low carbon alternatives. As set out in the Heat Decarbonisation Project Development Guidance, organisations should take a ‘whole building’ approach to heat decarbonisation and plans should include any measures necessary to enable cost-effective heat decarbonisation. 

For a list of the eligible technologies, please refer to the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme eligible technologies list, which can be found on the application form. Measures that do not enable the cost-effective decarbonisation of heat (e.g. feasibility of electric vehicle charge points) are not eligible for funding.

Funding for detailed designs should focus on installation of the low-carbon heating system and the measures necessary to directly support it. Renewable electricity generation, battery storage and EV charging are ineligible for detailed design funding.

If an applicant wishes to apply for detailed design funding work, this should will need to be carried out to be a minimum of up to RIBA stage 4 to ensure that the design has been carried out to a sufficient level of detail and maturity, ready for installation and capital funding. 

The following RIBA Stage 4 elements are not essential to be completed as part of Phase 5 Low Carbon Skills Fund detailed designs but will be beneficial when progressing completed designs to the construction phase:         

• Engagement with the Distribution Network Operator to determine viability and electrical upgrade requirements
• Submission of planning permission
• The creation of a project programme, cost plan and risk register for the proposed project

Although not all design work needs to be carried out to RIBA Stage 4 to deliver good project outcomes, this policy requirement prioritises robust work: oversights during detailed design work can be magnified during the already significantly more expensive installation phase.

Recognising that different levels of design can be appropriate for different projects, an applicant may still choose to take their LCSF project through feasibility and investment grade audits, which may include elements of RIBA stage 2 or 3 designs, for example where you are pursuing a “design and build” rather than “design then build” contracting approach, and for less technically complex projects. If you are not sure which approach is best for you, seek further guidance.

Yes, this building would be eligible for feasibility and design stage activities that require an end-of-life boiler (feasibility studies, specialist site surveys, investment grade audits and detailed designs). However, Salix would only be able to cover the works associated with the end-of-life boiler. Any works associated with the boilers that are not end-of-life would need to be covered by your organisation. 

A boiler has to be end-of-life (10+) by the end of the grant period (31st March 2025). So, an application for the feasibility and/or design stages can include a boiler that is currently 9 years old, as long as it will turn 10 years old by 31st March 2025. 

No. Organisations can only make one application to Phase 5 Low Carbon Skills Fund. If more than one application is submitted, Salix will accept the first application submitted and reject the remaining applications. 

Organisations cannot be included in a consortium bid if they have submitted an application individually.

There is no minimum amount that can be applied for, but the maximum grant value is £1,000,000. 

Additionally, to mitigate the risk that a small number of applications exhaust a large proportion of the available funding, the funding is divided across three grant value ranges: 

34% of funding for projects up to £100,000. 

38% of funding for projects between £100,001-£500,000. 

28% of funding for projects between £500,001-£1,000,000.  

These percentages do represent how the total scheme funding will be distributed across grants within the indicated value ranges, e.g. 34% of the total scheme funding will be awarded to projects with a value up to £100,000. 

These percentages do not represent the proportion of individual grant awards that Salix will fund (e.g. for grants up to £100,000, Salix will fund 100% of the grant value, not 34%). 

No, there are no word limits for any of the questions on the application portal or application form. However, we encourage you to be as clear and concise in your answers as possible.

Our assessment process includes consideration of the relationship between cost and proposed deliverables to ensure that value for money is delivered. There is no restriction on using cost estimates, including soft market testing, to complete your application. However, cost estimates need to be as robust as possible. You should consider securing estimates from multiple suppliers and reviewing available cost benchmarks, for example in the Energy Systems Catapults Public Sector Decarbonisation Guidance.  

Once a grant value has been agreed in a signed Grant Offer Letter, we will need to reduce the grant where costs are reduced but cannot increase the grant where costs increase. 

Upon submission, an automatic email will be sent to the named Authorising Official at your organisation. This email will request authorisation for Salix to begin assessing the application and requires a response, within 3 working days, via email from the Authorising Official before we can proceed. Please ensure the Authorising Official is available to respond so your application is not delayed. 

This automatic email will also require the Authorising Official to sign a counter fraud statement to confirm that your organisation has sufficient fraud mitigation in place. 

There are no limits to the number of buildings you can include in an application. However, please bear in mind that the works would have to be delivered by 31 March 2025 and you will need to fill in the details of all the buildings included in the Step 2 Building Data tab of the application form. 

There is currently room for 40 buildings, if you need additional rows, please contact our Low Carbon Skills Fund team at [email protected]. 

Before proceeding to project-specific works like feasibility and design, it is important that an organisation has developed a clear strategy, including developing targets and a prioritised plan of which projects to address first and why. This should include relevant energy, cost and emissions data required for feasibility and/or detailed design.  This is to ensure that organisations have an understanding of which technologies may be feasible as part of a cost-effective approach to delivering their targets across their estate. 

Similarly, if you are applying for the design stage, feasibility studies must be evidenced to prove the most viable low carbon heating solution has been chosen.  Design work should not take place for solutions that have not been demonstrated to be feasible. As per the guidance, there is scope for applicants to diverge from the illustrative process set out, where reasoning is provided. For example, it is possible to start from scratch and take a building through the strategy, feasibility and design stages, which would not require the submission of an existing heat decarbonisation plan. Similarly, an organisation might do feasibility work without the strategy stage because they already have a heat decarbonisation strategy in place, or because a fossil-fuel heating system urgently needs to be replaced with a low-carbon solution (making prioritisation more straightforward).

Organisations can submit a consortium application where the applicant submitting the application will manage the project on behalf of all the eligible organisations. There must be an agreement in place that the lead organisation will manage the financial responsibilities. As well as providing the lead contact responsible for managing the project and the lead Authorising Official with the authority to accept the grant award on behalf of all the organisations within the application. 

As organisations are limited to one application per organisation, an organisation is not able to submit an application as an individual organisation as well as an application as part of a consortium bid. If more than one application is submitted, we will accept the first application submitted and reject the remaining applications. 

Consortium applications will be rescoped to remove the ineligible applicant’s submission. 

Yes, buildings that are under a PFI agreement are eligible. However, PFI contracts can be fairly restrictive on what works can be done and who benefits from the savings. It is entirely dependent on what the restrictions are within the contract, so we would suggest reviewing it and evaluating whether there is value in including that site as part of the project. 

Applicants must upload their completed Phase 5 Low Carbon Skills Fund Application Form and any necessary supporting information to the application portal. The supporting documentation should include any completed HDPs, strategies or feasibility studies for projects that are applying for activities in the feasibility or design stage.

Schools can submit an individual application or be included within a local authority’s application. As an organisation can only make one application to Phase 5 LCSF, it is important that schools are not included within a local authority’s application and apply individually. 

If a school applies individually, the Authorising Official and project lead need to be employees of the school. These roles cannot be performed by an employee of the local authority. Consequently, the school would be responsible for the project governance and ensuring the grant terms and conditions were met. 

Yes, you can apply for strategy stage activities for certain buildings as well as feasibility and design stage activities for a different selection of buildings. Your answers in the application form should provide justification for why this approach has been taken. 

We would encourage you to read the Heat Decarbonisation Project Development Guidance, as it contains recommendations of how to combine the stages. 

Before proceeding to project specific work like feasibility studies, you need to be able to demonstrate that you are progressing the right projects in the right order.   

Developing a strategy can help you to work out which projects are progressed in what order, by defining objectives, setting targets and capturing information about your estate.  In this context there can be different approaches to prioritising projects, for example cost-effectiveness, emissions reductions and urgent plant replacement. 

Ideally your strategy will capture your whole estate before you progress specific projects, but this may not be proportional or relevant for all organisations. 

For example, for very large organisations with very large estates, it may be proportional for your strategy to only cover the site where project-specific work is being proposed. 

For small organisations which may only have one or two buildings, your strategy is likely to be shorter and less detailed, reflecting that you only need to prioritise across one or two buildings / possible projects. 

Not necessarily - in this instance we would discuss with you whether you reduce the scope of your bid, or whether you would like to withdraw from the process. 

We hope to notify our applicants of the outcome by end of July. 

We are aiming to issue Grant Offer Letters during May, June and July as projects are assessed and passed. There will also be a second window of reallocation upon contract award in Autumn. 

Applications must be original and bespoke to the organisation applying and the site(s) that is the subject of the application. Applications must also be completed in full. Where there is evidence that applications are not original and bespoke to the organisation applying or where answers requiring information is missing, these applications will be rejected.  

If more than one application is submitted, Salix will accept the first application submitted and reject the remaining applications. 

Prior to assessment, applications will be sorted into a random order, and assessed in that order. Applications will be assigned to each grant value range and assessed in the random order until the funding has been allocated. If there are insufficient applications in any of the grant ranges to meet the cap, then any unallocated funding will be used to fund applications from other grant ranges. 

Cost benchmarks are being used as a guideline to compare costs and identify outliers more easily. The benchmarks have been devised from cost breakdowns per activity and cost per m2/building from Phase 4 LCSF.

The scoring framework is used to guide the comprehensiveness and quality of information required to achieve a given score, across all of the questions.  All questions test different elements of the scheme criteria.   

Salix assessors use their experience and expertise to assess the extent to which an answer demonstrates compliance with the criteria and applies the relevant score with reference to the scoring framework. 

Where relevant the Salix Energy and Carbon Technical Team, and Salix’s specialist technical contractors, are called on to provide additional expertise. 

Yes, all the scored questions are weighted the same. Questions 1.4 and 3.1-3.5 will all receive an individual score. In addition to this, one score will be assigned to the costs and commentary provided on the step 4 tab of the application form. 

The question and cost assessment scoring criteria can be found on the last tab of the application form. 

Applicants should aim to answer each question as fully as possible, to demonstrate that their project meets the scheme criteria, rather than achieving a specific score. 

No. Salix do not have a recommended list. We would encourage you to speak to any peers or colleagues who may be able to make recommendations, including procurement professionals within your organisation or associated organisations. 

For guidance on your Phase 5 Low Carbon Skills Fund project, you could also get in contact with your local net zero hub: Greater South East Net Zero Hub, South West Net Zero Hub, North East and Yorkshire Net Zero Hub, North West Net Zero Hub or Midlands Net Zero Hub. 

The Authorising Official has the authority within the public sector organisation to receive and accept the grant that has been applied for. The Authorising Official will also have complete oversight of the grant and accountability for the funds being spent in accordance with the terms and conditions. The Authorising Official is required to sign grant documentation, such as the Grant Offer Letter, payment requests and the completion statement. 

The role of the main contact is to manage the project and be the point of contact for Salix. The role’s responsibilities include confirming payment forecasts, submission of quarterly monitoring reports and collate payment and completion documentation. 

It should be noted that the Authorising Official and the main contact can be the same person depending on the structure of your organisation. 

Peak heat loss calculations, relevant technical site surveys, data sheets, optimal sizing calculations, detailed design drawings with specification details and schematics for the proposed low carbon heating system with confirmation of proposed flow and return temperatures. Additional supporting information may be requested to clarify design details on completion.

There are no criteria specifying how many heat decarbonisation plans an organisation must produce, and organisations can produce heat decarbonisation plans for individual or multiple buildings. However, the submitted heat decarbonisation plans must reflect the basis on which funding was applied for, unless a scope change has been agreed with Salix. Every building in scope of the application must be covered by the heat decarbonisation plan/s submitted. 

No, the project lead needs to be an employee of the organisation applying for the funding.  

Yes, if you apply for feasibility studies, specialist site surveys, investment grade audits or detailed designs one of the conditions listed in your Grant Offer Letter will be to provide evidence that the buildings covered by these activities have at least one end-of-life boiler.  

This evidence normally consists of a picture of the name plate that includes the year of manufacture or 10+ years’ worth of annual service reports. 

If a boiler is younger than 10 years old and has failed, plant service reports stating that the boiler has failed would be considered sufficient evidence.