Node.

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.