Recently, 'Inside Housing' revealed that the government is planning to exclude social landlords from accessing millions of pounds of funding to tackle fuel poverty. The organisation said it understands the coalition is splitting the energy company obligation, which will subsidise retrofit works as part of its £7 billion a year green deal, into two pots - one of which will be used for ‘hard-to-treat’ measures such as solid wall insulation, and another called ‘affordable warmth’ which will be used to reduce fuel poverty. Despite the fact that millions of social tenants are fuel poor - meaning they spend more than 10 per cent of their household income on fuel bills - and have low incomes, the Department of Energy and Climate Change does not plan to allow social landlords to obtain subsidy from the affordable warmth fund.

This is because some social housing is more energy efficient than most homes in the private sector due to works already undertaken by landlords, or because newly built properties are better insulated.

ECO, which will be funded by energy companies taking cash from consumers’ fuel bills, is replacing existing funding including the carbon emissions reduction target and community energy saving programme which landlords have benefited from.

The details of the value of the overall ECO fund and how it will be split between the two pots are expected to be announced at the end of the month. This will be in a consultation on the government’s green deal scheme in which private companies pay for retrofit works and recoup the costs through the resulting energy bill savings. WWF said ECO needs to be worth ‘several billion’ for the green deal to work.

However, the social housing sector is now holding back from signing a pledge of support for the government’s flagship retrofit scheme because of fears it will be excluded from accessing the funding.

This week the NHF claimed that landlords could miss out on much of the money. It warned millions of the country’s poorest families could end up not benefiting from ECO despite paying for it if landlords are omitted from the affordable warmth subsidy.

Research from consultancy Camco, commissioned by the NHF, found 1.03 million homes - equivalent to 2.5 million people - would be vulnerable to fuel poverty as a result. There are also fears landlords could be edged out from the larger pot of ‘hard-to-treat’ funding for ECO which DECC focuses on solid wall properties.

The NHF this week warned the narrow definition of hard-to-treat would ‘largely exclude’ social landlords because most social homes were built post-war so fewer than a third have solid walls.

Pippa Read, policy leader at the NHF, said landlords would need ‘the certainty of open and fair access to ECO and clarity over other assumptions before committing to firm numbers as providers or procurers. If the government can provide certainty on these issues a social housing pledge could still be a very useful tool in evidencing the scale of the sector’s commitment to the green deal to the finance community in particular,’ she added.

Nicholas Doyle, director of sustainability at 62,034-home housing association Places for People, said: ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea at this point [to sign a pledge]. We haven’t seen enough of what it [ECO and the green deal] looks like yet.’