Solar Together: How Council Group-Buying Solar Schemes Work in the UK

If your council has emailed you about "Solar Together", "Switch Together", or a similarly named solar scheme, you've been offered a spot in a group-buying auction run by a private company called iChoosr on behalf of your local authority. It's a real, long-running scheme — iChoosr has run these auctions for UK councils since 2015 — and a primary source, the Greater London Authority, has confirmed genuine double-digit savings on some phases. But the same scheme has also left thousands of households chasing refunds after a winning installer collapsed. Here's what actually happens between registering and getting panels on your roof, and what to check before you commit.

How the reverse auction actually works

You don't get a single fixed price when you register. Councils partner with iChoosr, which opens a free, no-obligation registration window — typically two to three months — for residents to say they're interested in solar PV, battery storage, or an EV charger. Once registration closes, iChoosr uses that aggregated demand to run a reverse auction: pre-vetted installers compete to win the whole batch of customers by offering their best collective price, since they save on individual marketing and sales costs. iChoosr then puts the winning installer's individual quote in front of you, and you decide — for free — whether to accept it. There's no obligation to proceed at any stage before you sign a contract with the installer, and a small refundable deposit is typically required once you do.

How much you can actually save

Savings estimates vary by scheme and region, so treat any single figure as indicative rather than guaranteed. The most authoritative figure available comes from the Greater London Authority's own review of Solar Together London: it put customer savings at 20-30% below the cost of sourcing quotes individually, across the scheme's various phases. Other council-run rounds have reported broadly similar ranges. That discount comes off the price of an already-substantial purchase — most systems still run into five figures before the discount — so it's worth comparing the post-auction quote against typical UK solar panel costs rather than assuming the scheme automatically beats every independent quote.

What's covered

Coverage has expanded scheme by scheme, but most current rounds include:

• Solar PV panels for roof-mounted, grid-tied systems
• Battery storage — either bundled with new panels or as a battery-only option for households with existing solar
• EV charge points, in some regional schemes

The winning installer(s) still need to meet the same certification bar as any other UK solar installer — MCS certification for eligibility for the Smart Export Guarantee, plus schemes like HIES or TrustMark for consumer protection. That's meant to be part of the value of the scheme: iChoosr does the vetting upfront so you don't have to shortlist installers yourself. In practice, that vetting hasn't always held up (see below).

Which councils are running a scheme in 2026

Solar Together-branded or rebranded ("Switch Together") schemes have run in London, Surrey, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Dorset, Monmouthshire, Solihull and the wider West Midlands, the West of England (Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset, South Gloucestershire, North Somerset), and multiple Kent districts, among others. Sussex — led by West Sussex County Council — has just entered a new five-year procurement (2026-2031) for its next domestic solar and battery group-buying round after its previous iChoosr contract expired. Registration windows are short and don't run continuously: Solihull's most recent round, for example, ran from late February to late April 2026. If your council isn't running a round right now, the honest answer is to register your interest on solartogether.co.uk and wait — some councils go 6 months or more between rounds.

The catch: what happens if the winning installer fails

This is the part scheme promotion pages don't lead with. Because the whole point of the auction is concentrating a large batch of customers on one or two winning installers, a single installer's collapse can strand thousands of households at once. It's happened more than once. The clearest documented case is Green Energy Together (GET UK), which won a large share of Solar Together London's phases 4 and 5: by June 2023, complaint rates had reached 22.74% for phase 4 and 16.6% for phase 5. GET UK lost its HIES membership in February 2023 and had its MCS certification cancelled the following month, then entered liquidation in May 2023. Of roughly 4,600 customers who had signed up with GET UK, around 1,500 were still dealing with unresolved issues by June 2023, including hundreds still waiting on deposit refunds and dozens with partially completed installations. The GLA says it eventually helped the great majority of affected customers secure either a refund or a completed, MCS-certified installation — but it took the direct intervention of London's mayoral authority to get there, not an automatic safeguard built into the scheme itself.

The practical takeaway isn't to avoid these schemes outright — it's to treat the winning installer exactly as you would any other solar installer you're about to sign a contract with. Check their current MCS and HIES/TrustMark status yourself (accreditations can lapse between the auction and your install date), ask how your deposit is protected, and don't assume the council or iChoosr is standing behind the installer's solvency. Our guide on how to choose a solar installer covers the due-diligence checks worth doing regardless of how you found the company.

Stacking it with 0% VAT and the Smart Export Guarantee

A group-buying discount is separate from — and stacks with — the other cost reductions already available on solar in Great Britain. Installing solar PV and battery storage in a residential property currently qualifies for 0% VAT on both materials and labour, in place until 31 March 2027 (reverting to the standard 5% reduced rate after that). Once installed, an MCS-certified system remains eligible for Smart Export Guarantee payments for surplus electricity exported to the grid, provided the installer stays MCS-accredited through completion. Our guides to UK solar grants and VAT relief and the best solar installers (which already lists Solar Together as one route to a quote) cover both in more detail.

Should you use it?

Solar Together and its regional variants are a legitimate way to access a vetted installer at a genuinely discounted price — the GLA's 20-30% figure is a real, primary-sourced number, not marketing spin. But it isn't the only way to get a competitive quote, and it isn't risk-free. Before registering, it's worth: checking your council's current round is actually open (not just the general Solar Together site); getting at least one independent quote to compare against the auction result once it arrives; verifying the winning installer's MCS/HIES status yourself at the point you're asked to sign; and understanding your deposit protection before you pay it. Used that way, it's one more source of quotes to compare — not a substitute for doing your own checks.