Andy Piper - Cracking delivery at scale needs policy shift

If we’re going to properly address the housing decarbonisation challenge, we need to see greater collaboration across the sector, and a bold change in the government’s overarching policy approach – and we need to see it soon, writes VIVID’s Andy Piper

Like many others across the sector, we’re working hard to plan and deliver large scale retrofitting of our homes.

We also recognise that despite a valued focus on grant funding through the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF), the current retrofitting policy framework is nowhere near strong enough to deliver the large-scale delivery that’s needed.

It was encouraging, however, to hear calls from elsewhere in the sector recently for us all to be more joined up when it comes to retrofitting, and how we need to have a broader view of our work (and not deliver it in isolation).

Net zero will deliver the most significant transformation of the UK’s built environment that we’ve ever seen. All of the UK’s 27m homes will need some form of retrofit to achieve a net zero emissions economy by 2050 – that’s nearly three thousand retrofits a day for the next 26 years.

This is a challenge that affects all housing tenures rather than just social housing. And the housing sector is currently catalyzing this effort without a national plan.

As a housing association we don’t want to leave residents living in homes neighbouring ours behind when we deliver our retrofit investment. And we see our local authority partners, private landlords and other housing associations as key partners to deliver a more equitable, cross-tenure approach.

All tenures together

While it’s critical that the sector works collaboratively, and there’s already some great examples of this, it’s also critical that we encourage the government to take a step forward. We need to see the retrofit reins properly picked up with a distinct step change away from the current piecemeal policy approach to a more strategic, structured one.

So, if we’re to deliver the scale of retrofit needed to achieve net zero, we need to see the government bring forward a national retrofit strategy and plan that provides solutions for the retrofitting of all tenures.

A new national retrofit delivery agency should be launched to take responsibility for putting it into action. The national agency should continue the Social Housing Retrofit Accelerator’s legacy of supporting housing stakeholders to improve their knowledge, skills, and capacity to deliver retrofit at scale.

A network of regional retrofit delivery units should also form part of this structure, helping to coordinate the development and delivery of local retrofit schemes. This could be delivered by local authorities or the Net Zero Hubs but whoever takes on this role will need the funding and resources to support very large-scale delivery.

The use of Local Area Energy Plans (LAEPs) needs to be central to this approach. LAEPs are an important tool to encourage local collaboration, and to plan and deliver both retrofit and new low carbon energy infrastructure such as heat networks. Without local delivery plans, it’s difficult to see how we’ll achieve a significant shift in scale and cross tenure delivery over the next 26 years.

Key benefits

One of the key benefits of LAEPs is that they allow us to take a long-term approach to de-risking our programmes. For example, many of the UK’s homes are considered hard to treat, so we’ll need time to develop bespoke design solutions across large numbers of similar local housing archetypes.

While the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund has provided a crucial source of funding to the sector, this too needs to evolve as part of any future policy shift.

Funding recently announced by government for local authority energy efficiency delivery should be used in conjunction with SHDF grant to deliver cross-tenure retrofit. A national agency supported by regional delivery units, would have the ability to distribute this funding with a greater focus on supporting realistic longer-term delivery focused on local priorities.

We need to make this call for change a loud one, so I hope you’ll join us – next time you’re engaging with government officials, ministers or advisers, parliamentarians or peers, we’d ask you to mention that its time – time for a proper retrofit plan, time for an enhanced approach to retrofit funding, and time that we see a body and a structure that can help drive and support local retrofit delivery at the pace and scale needed to transform the UK’s homes.

Interview featured on Housing Digital by Mark Cantrell.