The Home Index

England & Wales coverage · EPC + national hardship indices · Open Government Licence

The Cold Homes Index

Great Yarmouth has the most acute combination of cold-home risk in England — scoring 88/100 across off-gas-grid heating, fuel poverty, solid-wall construction and deprivation.

Four official datasets, one composite — where England's retrofit problem is hardest to solve. Local authorities ranked 0–100, free to cite with attribution.

The decomposition

Hard to heat × hard to fix

Scatter plot of English local authorities. The vertical axis is hard to heat (off-gas grid and fuel poverty); the horizontal axis is hard to fix (solid-wall construction and deprivation). Areas in the top-right are worst on both — the cold-homes danger zone.

296 scored local authorities · 22 explicitly missing a required component out of 318 · off-gas-grid & solid-wall from EPC certificates; fuel poverty (DESNZ) & deprivation (IMD) per local authority · vintage 2026-Q2. Equal-weighted percentiles; areas missing any input are excluded, never imputed.

The league

Where cold homes concentrate

For local reporters: find your authority in the ranking below — click through for its full area report and a citable figure.

  1. 1Great Yarmouth88 / 100
  2. 2Birmingham85 / 100
  3. 3Leicester84 / 100
  4. 4Nottingham84 / 100
  5. 5Hastings81 / 100
  6. 6East Lindsey81 / 100
  7. 7Liverpool80 / 100
  8. 8Enfield80 / 100
  9. 9Manchester80 / 100
  10. 10Wolverhampton79 / 100
  11. 11Westminster79 / 100
  12. 12Brent79 / 100
  13. 13Boston77 / 100
  14. 14Malvern Hills77 / 100
  15. 15Haringey77 / 100
  16. 16West Lindsey76 / 100
  17. 17Coventry75 / 100
  18. 18Ipswich75 / 100
  19. 19Luton75 / 100
  20. 20Brighton and Hove75 / 100

Cite this

The Home Index Cold Homes Index (2026-Q2): Great Yarmouth scores 88/100, #1 of 296 English local authorities by combined cold-home risk. Sources: EPC Open Data, DESNZ fuel poverty, English Indices of Deprivation (Open Government Licence).
Download the data →

Free to cite with attribution · Open Government Licence.

How it's built

Method

Each area is scored on four national percentiles — off-gas-grid share and fuel poverty (how hard to heat), solid-wall share and deprivation (how hard to fix) — averaged equally into a 0–100 index. Off-gas-grid and solid-wall shares come from EPC certificates; fuel poverty and deprivation are published per local authority. See the methodology for full definitions, and check a specific home to see what fixing it would take.