The council has approved a contract to prepare the Civic, Central Library and Woughton Leisure Centre for a waste-heat network. No cost or date published.
Milton Keynes City Council has approved a contract to start the building work that will connect three of its own buildings to a heat network running on waste heat rather than gas.
The council announced the award on 17 September. The contractor is Fair Heat. The buildings are:
- the Civic building, 1 Saxon Gate East
- Central Library
- Woughton Leisure Centre
The work is paid for out of £4.35m the council won from the government’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, which is run by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and delivered by Salix. The council describes the contract as the building works needed to prepare the three buildings for connection to a low-carbon heat network.
Where the heat comes from
A heat network takes heat that is already being produced somewhere and pipes it to buildings instead of letting it escape, so the buildings on it burn less gas of their own.
When the council announced the grant in June 2025 it named the source. The council processes 133,000 tonnes of waste that cannot be recycled at its Waste Recovery Park each year. That process already generates the electricity that charges its electric bin lorries, and the council says it creates heat as well.
The council’s target is to be a net zero council by 2030. The government’s target is for 17% of UK heat to come from local heat networks by the same year.
That June 2025 announcement also said that “next month the city council will take a formal decision to approve the procurement process”. Fourteen months separate that promised July 2025 decision from this week’s contract award.
What the council has not said
Three things are missing from the announcement, and all three are the sort of detail a resident would reasonably expect.
There is no contract value. The £4.35m is the grant, not the price of this contract. We checked the council’s published decisions on 19 September: there is no decision record for a heat network contract, and the council’s officer decisions page returned “no matching decisions”. The award appears only in the press release.
There is no timetable. The release gives no start date for the works, no completion date, and no date when any of the three buildings stops using gas.
The claim has been quietly softened. In June 2025 the council said the three would be “the first council buildings in the UK to join an innovative new zero carbon heat network”. This week’s release says they are set to become “among a relatively small number of public buildings in the UK connected to a heat network”. Nothing explains the change.
A second heat network, and they are not the same thing
It is easy to run these together, so it is worth separating them.
The council’s project uses heat from its own waste plant. Separately, the developer 1Energy is building the Milton Keynes Energy Network, which it says draws on heat pumps and waste heat recovery from connected data centres. On 1Energy’s own project page that scheme carries a £17.6m grant from the government’s Green Heat Network Fund inside a £95m total investment, with first customers supplied in March 2027 and completion late in 2027. It claims 15,800 tonnes of CO2 saved a year.
The council’s September release does not say which of these the Civic, the library and Woughton will end up joining, and the 2025 announcement pointed at the waste plant rather than at 1Energy. We could not resolve it from any published council document.
What it means for you
If you use Central Library or Woughton Leisure Centre, expect building work at some point, though nobody has said when. The council says the point of the change is to cut carbon and to stop those buildings being exposed to gas price spikes, which is a running cost you pay for through council tax.
If you live nearby, the longer-term pitch is that the same pipes eventually reach homes and businesses. Both the 2025 and 2026 announcements describe that as something that “could” happen. No street, no date and no price has been published, so treat it as an ambition rather than an offer.
If you want to follow it, the decision record is the place it should appear. Council decisions are listed on the council’s decisions pages, and we track local planning and council business on our Milton Keynes planning news page.
Sources: Milton Keynes City Council, “Green light for Milton Keynes heat network project”, 17 September 2026; Milton Keynes City Council, “Innovative City Council heat network will be UK’s first”, 16 June 2025; 1Energy, Milton Keynes Energy Network; and the council’s published decisions, checked 19 September 2026.
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