Actions should contribute to actively alleviating energy poverty and build on the tools, indicators and resources of existing initiatives, such as the Energy Poverty Advisory Hub and the energy poverty pillar of Covenant of Mayors.

Proposals are encouraged for actions with an overarching focus on alleviating summer energy poverty and/or actions focusing on geographic areas with less developed energy poverty alleviation measures and frameworks.

The proposed action should cover only one of the two scopes below, either Scope A or Scope B of the topic. The scope addressed should be specified in the proposal introduction. In case of Scope A, actions can address one or both sub-scopes.

Scope A: Policy and coordination support to public authorities and stakeholders

• Actions should support national, regional and/or local authorities and societal intermediaries in setting up long-term, cross-sectoral coordination structures to tackle energy poverty. The coordination structures should foster cross-departmental and vertical collaboration across national, regional, and local government structures and social intermediaries, and could include setting up longterm national energy poverty observatories. Where national coordination structures or observatories already exist, the proposal should clearly demonstrate the need for, and added value of, any new coordination structures. To facilitate the set-up of such structures and build the necessary organisational expertise, the proposed action should also include the delivery of capacity-building activities for the national, regional and/or local authorities and societal intermediaries involved in the coordination structures. The actors involved are expected to represent all relevant sectors (e.g. energy, social, health and housing) to ensure a holistic participatory approach to the alleviation of energy poverty in the long term and to improve social cohesion.
• Deliver tailored policy support to national authorities on the implementation of relevant provisions of the EED (recast)55 to allow authorities to design and take concrete policy level actions to empower and protect energy poor households. The proposed action should provide public authorities with support and advice on e.g. regulatory, funding and technical aspects to help analyse their national policy mix, and to combine, contextualise and pull the different energy poverty-related provisions together to allow for the effective and coherent planning, design and improvement of energy poverty alleviation strategies and measures at the national level. In doing so, the action should ensure the involvement and mobilisation of national authorities across different sectors and support these authorities to map out and evaluate the impact of different implementation options, taking into account the specific national needs and context on energy poverty.
• It is expected that the relevant national/regional/local authorities and stakeholders such as consumer or social organisations, the housing sector, or healthcare providers are either directly involved or their concrete support and involvement is demonstrated in the proposal.

Scope B: Support for residential multi-apartment building renovation

• Actions should support the energy renovation of residential multiapartment buildings with energy poor inhabitants, with a particular focus on reinforcing and adapting the governance and decision-making structures of building management and homeowners or tenants associations, tackling related regulatory framework barriers (e.g. property and/or rental laws), split incentives, and setting up and coordinating relevant support services. The renovation actions supported should take into account the ability of residents to remain in their homes after works, thereby avoiding so-called renovictions, and may also include renewable energy solutions.
• It is expected that the homeowners or tenant associations and housing organisations, in particular, are either directly involved in the consortium or their concrete support and involvement is clearly demonstrated in the proposal.
• The proposed actions should take into account multiple benefits from the energy efficiency and renewable energy measures for the different energy poor target groups, such as improved health, comfort, air quality, better social inclusion etc.

Specific attention could be paid to particular groups which are more at risk of being affected by energy poverty or more susceptible to the adverse impacts of energy poverty, taking into account gender, where relevant. Proposals are not expected to develop new IT tools, databases or platforms, unless their added value compared to existing ones is justified, and their potential scale-up beyond the project convincingly addressed.