healthy Homes Node
With the support of Innovate UK, the Healthy Homes Hub, Good Homes Alliance, and the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products have built a prototype online research hub called the Node that synthesises and quality assesses a range of evidence across housing, health and energy. No single platform exists to do this making it very challenging for industry policy-makers and academics to ensure they are targeting their research effectively and making the right, evidence based decisions. The Node is not a search engine. It is a quality-assessed, structured evidence infrastructure built specifically for the intersection of housing, health and energy.
We are working on next steps currently and once ir progresses, this could become a vital tool for our members to navigate the complex landscape of health and housing research and better target innovation and investment.
At a glance:
Platform: A national, curated, quality-assessed digital evidence platform connecting housing, health and energy research
Lead organisation: Healthy Homes Hub (HHH), with the Good Homes Alliance (GHA) and Alliance for Sustainable Building Products (ASBP)
Prototype status: Production-grade prototype completed in three months, demonstrating core capability across ventilation and indoor air quality
Geographic reach: UK-wide
Users: Policymakers, researchers, housing professionals, industry and householders
Funding: Node is funded by Innovate UK
Project stage: Under development
The Problem: A market failure with real costs
Housing, health and energy research is scattered across academic journals, government reports and industry literature. No single platform synthesises it, assesses its quality or makes it accessible to the practitioners, policymakers and businesses who need it most.
Because no commercial incentive exists to do this work, it simply does not happen, and the costs are borne collectively. The consequences are significant:
- Duplication of R&D investment and wasted resource across the sector
- Slow, fragmented evidence undermining effective policy design
- Critical links between housing conditions, health outcomes and energy performance are
- routinely missed
- Poor housing already costs the NHS an estimated £1.4 billion per year
- In 2023/24, 1.3 million households were living with significant levels of damp (English Housing Survey)
This is not an oversight. It is a structural market failure: the benefits of a shared evidence platform are diffuse and public, while the cost of building it falls on a single actor. No commercial organisation can capture sufficient returns to justify the investment. This is precisely the kind of market failure that Innovate UK, in its 2026 prospectus, explicitly commits to correct; closing the gap between discovery and commercial impact where the market alone cannot, and backing the UK’s most promising innovators to start, scale and stay in the UK.
The Node: What it does and why it is different
The Node is not a search engine. It is a quality-assessed, structured evidence infrastructure built specifically for the intersection of housing, health and energy that fills a genuine gap in national research infrastructure.. Its core features distinguish it from anything currently available:
- Cross-sector scope: evidence spanning housing, health and energy in a single platform
- Accessible to all: designed for practitioners and policymakers, not only academic researchers
- AI-assisted curation with expert verification, combining scale with quality
- A structured ontology bridging the vocabularies of building physicists, health professionals
- and policymakers
- Gap analysis capability: identifying where research is missing, not just what exists
- Quality assessment built in, using a transparent and practical five-criteria framework
Lead organisations:
More information:
For more information about Node, please contact us.