solar panels for housing associations in Nottingham

Guidance for social landlords in Nottingham and the wider Nottinghamshire area, including Beeston, West Bridgford, Arnold.

Solar for Nottingham’s social landlords, a 2028 carbon-neutral city target

Nottingham has set a carbon-neutral target of 2028, one of the most ambitious of any UK city. That makes it one of the most important and fastest-moving markets in the country for social-housing solar. Nottingham City Council manages a large council-housing stock through Nottingham City Homes Registered Provider (around 24,000 homes), and a tier of housing associations adds many thousands more. Social landlords in England are working towards the government’s confirmed 2030 EPC C target: social rented homes to reach EPC band C or higher on reformed EPCs, against any one metric, by 1 April 2030, and the city’s own 2028 target pushes harder still. Rooftop solar PV is one of the cheapest measures that lifts a home from EPC D to C, can cut the tenant’s electricity bill, depending on how much of the generation the household uses, and earns Smart Export Guarantee income.

Nottingham’s 2028 carbon-neutral target sits within its Carbon Neutral 2028 Action Plan, and the city has real pedigree in deep social-housing retrofit, it was an early UK pioneer of whole-house Energiesprong-style retrofit on council stock, wrapping homes in new fabric and adding solar and heat pumps. The Robin Hood Energy legacy also left the city with strong community-energy expertise. With fuel poverty concentrated across the southern and northern estates, the social-value case for solar on social housing is compelling.

Where Nottingham social-housing solar makes the most sense

Nottingham’s social stock divides into the archetypes that drive a solar programme. The big postwar estates ring the city: Clifton to the south, one of the largest council estates in Europe when built, Bestwood and Bulwell to the north, Bilborough and Broxtowe to the west, and the inner estates of St Ann’s and The Meadows close to the centre, both substantially rebuilt in the 1970s. These mix pitched-roof houses and semis, ideal for dwelling-level PV delivered street by street, with the walk-up flats and remaining blocks where the communal landlord supply is the easiest, highest self-consumption win.

The usual approach is to work archetype-by-archetype: survey a representative sample of each house type across the NG districts, standardise the design so that it follows PAS 2035, then deliver in street-by-street batches. Nottingham’s deep-retrofit heritage means many archetypes are already well understood here, which speeds design and standardisation. The vast Clifton estate, with its coherent runs of similar 1950s housing, is exactly the kind of stock where archetype-led delivery drives cost-per-home down fastest. That keeps a programme deliverable against both the 2030 national and 2028 city deadlines.

What Nottingham’s 2028 target means for your programme

Nottingham City Council’s 2028 carbon-neutral target and Action Plan give social landlords clear policy backing for retrofit, and a pressing timeline. For solar specifically, most domestic rooftop PV across the NG districts is permitted development under Class A of Part 14 of the GPDO 2015, which covers houses and blocks of flats within size limits. Listed buildings are excluded, and in a conservation area (such as the Park Estate, Lace Market, and parts of the city centre) solar is not permitted development on a wall facing a highway, a flat-roof array needs the council’s prior approval, and a local Article 4 direction can remove the right. The city’s community-energy expertise and deep-retrofit track record add practical delivery capacity on top of the national funding picture.

The Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund (WH:SHF), the successor to the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, is the main national fund for this work. Wave 3 allocated £1.29bn for delivery from 2025 to 2028, for existing social housing below EPC band C in England, a scale that fits Nottingham’s history of large, ambitious programmes. Its application window closed on 25 November 2024 and the list of successful landlords was published on 11 March 2025; delivery runs to September 2028 and all grant must be spent by 31 March 2028. Programmes funded this way depend on archetype modelling and careful sequencing of grant spend, built on PAS 2035. For Nottingham’s higher-risk residential buildings (18 m or seven storeys and above), any roof work engages the Building Safety Act 2022 regime, so a structural survey and a fire-safety design (BS 9991 is the standard to check against) should be expected for every block array.

What it costs and what Nottingham tenants save

A typical Nottingham social home takes a 1.5 to 4 kW system (4 to 10 panels) at roughly £3,500 to £7,500 fully installed, with cost-per-home falling as the work is delivered street by street across an estate. Sized for tenant self-consumption, that system lets a resident use the generation directly, and the saving depends on how much of it the household uses. The benefit model is best agreed with the landlord first: tenants self-consume the generation and pocket the saving, while the landlord (or a split-benefit tariff partner) registers the array for the Smart Export Guarantee and takes only the surplus export. Tariffs vary by supplier; the better fixed rates open to anyone are around 12 to 13p per kWh (October 2026, indicative).

Communal arrays on Nottingham’s blocks and sheltered schemes are priced per block (£10,000 to £135,000) and use a larger share of their generation on site because the landlord daytime load runs continuously. National Grid Electricity Distribution covers the East Midlands network; G98 notification handles installs up to 3.68 kW per phase, while communal and larger arrays need a G99 application that can take several months on constrained networks, so those are best lodged early in the programme.

An illustrative example: deep retrofit plus solar in Nottingham

Illustrative example (not a client project): picture a Nottingham social landlord with a large tranche of postwar estate housing across Clifton and Bestwood, much of it at EPC D, building on the city’s pioneering whole-house deep-retrofit experience. Such a landlord might build on that delivery heritage and Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund money to plan whole-house measures, new fabric and ventilation, alongside dwelling-level PV sized for tenant self-consumption.

In this illustration, solar would also help offset the running cost of electrified heat in the deeply retrofitted homes, and tenants would benefit from the generation they use directly.

Working across Nottingham and Nottinghamshire

Many Nottingham social landlords manage homes beyond the city boundary, and often run programmes across the wider county. Programmes commonly span the NG postcode districts and into the neighbouring areas, Beeston and West Bridgford in the suburbs, Arnold and Hucknall to the north, and Long Eaton across the Derbyshire border. Each has its own social stock facing the same 2030 EPC C target within the East Midlands funding landscape.

Nearby cities such as Derby, Mansfield, and Loughborough complete the regional picture, and landlords with stock in Nottingham often hold homes across those markets too. A programme works best with one consistent PAS 2035 process, archetype design, and tenant-benefit model across district lines.

Start with our social-housing cost breakdown, check the live position on the grants and funding page, and when you are ready, send an enquiry about your Nottingham stock and we reply by email.