A handbook for Creating Better Places

Produced by Urban Foresight for Innovate UK, Creating Better Places is built on a simple premise: climate action is not a separate agenda. When embedded well, it is a powerful lever to improve everyday outcomes for residents and support place-based renewal and resilient economic growth.

Shaped by the experiences of local authorities participating in Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme, the handbook is designed as a key resource for council officers who are delivering clean energy and decarbonisation projects, to help speed up delivery and achieve better outcomes more efficiently and effectively.

Supporting places to move from ambition to delivery

Across the Net Zero Living Programme, local authorities demonstrated that the main barriers to progress are rarely a lack of ambition or technology. Much of the technology needed already exists. The challenge lies in the non-technological barriers, such as adopting new technology and ways of working, coordination, behaviours, and skills that make solutions work in real local contexts.

Places across the UK that made progress focused on overcoming non-technological barriers from fragmented governance, weak mandate and misaligned incentives to limited internal capacity and unclear routes to delivery. The handbook distils these lessons into practical approaches to ten key areas for delivery that other places can apply.

Each area includes a dedicated resource pack with key concepts, practical steps, tools and real‑world examples from programme participants.

The handbook also includes a diagnostic tool designed to help teams pinpoint barriers to progress and prioritise where to focus next.

A practical handbook informed by real experience

This work is informed by Urban Foresight’s leadership of  Future Ready, the national capacity‑building service within Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme. Through targeted mentoring, skills development and expert guidance, Future Ready supported nearly 60 places overcome non-technological barriers to delivery and fostered a strong community of practice to inform both local action and national policy.

The service focused on enabling long‑term, scalable decarbonisation by enhancing knowledge, confidence and capability. It supported local authorities and their partners to accelerate delivery, strengthen governance, empower citizens, build trusted partnerships, coordinate regionally and develop investable project pipelines. These themes underpin the handbook and reflect the real challenges places face when moving from ambition to implementation.

The handbook builds on Urban Foresight’s previous work for Innovate UK identifying the innovation gap between local authorities and supplies of products and services that could facilitate the transition to net zero, and complements our wide-ranging experience in net zero solutions and local capacity building.

Download Creating Better Places to learn more. Contact us to talk more about how we can support your net zero journey.