Nest Newsletter – Spring 2023

Welcome to the Spring 2023 edition of the Nest Partner Newsletter

It’s been a difficult winter, so the coming of spring and warmer weather is welcome to us all. But it doesn’t mean times are getting easier for homes across Wales as the cost of living continues to rise.

That’s why we’re still here to help people in fuel poverty, improve energy efficiency and lower bills.

Take a look at the work we’ve done over the last year, from providing free impartial advice, to packages of free home energy efficiency improvements.

Nest Annual Report 2021-22

We recently published our Annual Report for 2021-22, highlighting our work supporting households across Wales.

This included:

• 15,777 households receiving free and impartial energy saving advice.
• 5,127 households receiving a home energy improvement package, with a modelled average energy bill saving of £300 per year.
• Benefit entitlement checks resulting in a household average £3,254.24 potential increase in benefit take-up.
• 100% of installations completed by Wales-based installers.
• Creation of 15 jobs and supporting our contractors with 25 apprenticeships and 2 traineeships. 

Every nest is different

In November 2022, we launched our ‘Every nest is different’ campaign.

Our campaign hero, Little Bill, offers lots of tips to save money on energy bills.

Every nest is different, but small changes can add up when it comes to saving money and energy.

Stakeholder Pack

We’ve put together a Stakeholder Pack, so our partners can support us with our ‘Every nest is different’ marketing activities and extend our reach to as many households that need our help.

This pack contains all our campaign resources in one place, including social media posts, imagery and animations for use in your marketing activity.

Partnership between NEST and Hywel Dda University Health Board

There is a strong evidence-base that housing and health are strongly linked.  The relationship between housing and health is complex, with impacts on both physical and mental health.  Furthermore, housing can not only influence the risk of illness, both positively and negatively, but is also a major factor in the pressures that hospitals experience in terms of admissions and discharges. NEST has been working with the Welsh NHS for many years and has a particularly strong partnership with Hywel Dda University Health Board (HDUHB), which covers three counties in West Wales. There is a large land area covered by HDUHB, with many rural communities and some areas of deprivation. 

In the spring of 2021 some new partnership arrangements began to emerge between NEST and HDUHB.  An initial discussion between Peter Hughes in NEST and Dr Gareth Morgan from the Public Health Directorate explored some ideas of a new project. This was to build a connection between the smoking cessation service delivered by HDHUB and the NEST project. People with a history of smoking have increased risks of heart and lung disease.  Cold homes can aggravate these smoking related illnesses and potentially lead to poor outcomes for patients, including increased risks of hospital admission.  So for people who are motivated to stop smoking, information on NEST would be relevant as an additional measure to improve their health and wellbeing in the future. 

A fresh development then occurred in September 2021. Dr Morgan applied for a prestigious Bevan Exemplar award, named of course after the founder of the NHS, on a project called ‘Building Bridges Between Housing and Health’.  The intention was to produce a good practice guide for the NHS in Wales to maximise the public health potential of working with housing partners.  Dr Morgan convened and chaired an all-Wales ‘Community of Practice’ with NEST colleagues being crucial in this work.  NEST have therefore been co-holders of this Bevan Exemplar award and discussions are now underway with other Health Boards in Wales to implement the good practice guide. The collaboration and partnership between NEST and HDUHB strongly illustrates the appetite for innovation in Wales so along with other equally enthusiastic partners, we could develop a housing and health programme that could inform international work.