From insights to action: celebrating the Net Zero Living Programme

After two and a half years of national collaboration, the Innovate UK Net Zero Living Programme reached its conclusion in Manchester this week.

As Innovate UK’s community and knowledge sharing delivery partner, Urban Foresight led the Future Ready service throughout the programme: building capability across 52 local authorities, connecting peers, coordinating expert support, and capturing the insights needed to accelerate the UK’s transition to net zero.

The Net Zero Living Showcase brought together councils from across the UK alongside Innovate UK, technical assistance experts, government partners, and industry, all focused on what comes next for place-based decarbonisation.

Leading local change

Local authorities from as far afield as York, Bristol, Leicestershire, Rossendale, Peterborough, Orkney, Shetland, and Liverpool delivered rapid showcase presentations of their pilot projects, revealing what they needed next, how others could support them, and the actions that drive real progress.

Across the presentations, a clear picture emerged: the barriers to progress are rarely about technology. They are about governance, capacity, and the confidence to act.

The Creating Better Places Handbook

A highlight of the event was a dedicated session on the Creating Better Places handbook, produced by Urban Foresight for Innovate UK.

The handbook and its ten accompanying resource packs distil lessons from across the programme into practical approaches to ten key areas of delivery. It makes the case that the main barriers to climate action are not technological: they are the social, cultural, governance, and capacity challenges that prevent good solutions from being adopted at scale.

Directly informed by Urban Foresight’s leadership of Future Ready, the handbook provides a practical, evidence-based roadmap for council officers delivering clean energy and decarbonisation projects, helping them move faster and achieve better outcomes. It also includes a diagnostic tool to help teams identify where to focus next.

Download Creating Better Places to explore the full resource.

Our role in Future Ready

Urban Foresight was appointed by Innovate UK in 2023 to lead the Future Ready service – the national capacity-building programme within the £60m Net Zero Living initiative. We supported 52 local authorities to overcome systemic, non-technical barriers to net zero delivery across three cohorts.

The service focused on building local authority capacity through mentoring and systems change learning; connecting participants to share knowledge and best practice; and coordinating targeted technical support.

Urban Foresight also acted as programme monitoring and evaluation partner to turn insights from across the cohort into actionable guidance for local authorities and national policy.

Dinah Jackson, Urban Foresight’s Project Manager for Future Ready, said, “What’s struck me most across this programme is how much local authorities already know. The ambition has always been there. What Future Ready gave people was the space to connect, the confidence to push through the hard parts, and a community of peers who understood exactly what they were facing. Seeing that come to life at the Showcase – and knowing the Creating Better Places handbook will carry those lessons forward – makes two and a half years of work feel very worthwhile.”

Closing out the programme and looking forward

The Showcase reinforced a shared ambition: to scale and embed the progress already made, ensuring that local innovations continue to deliver national impact long after the Net Zero Living Programme ends.

For Urban Foresight, this programme has deepened our expertise in place-based decarbonisation, community of practice design, and systems change, capabilities we bring to every engagement. Contact us to talk about how we can support your net zero journey.