Becci Taylor, Arup Director and Retrofit at Scale business leader for the UKIMEA, investigates the issues holding back widespread home retrofitting in the UK.
The world has a building problem. While paramount to our lives, buildings account for 39% of global energy related carbon emissions. With temperatures ever rising, and extreme weather becoming all the more common, drastic reductions in carbon emissions must be made. The World Economic Forum advises that it will be impossible to meet global emissions targets if our focus remains solely on new buildings.
When you consider that 80% of today’s buildings will still be in use by 2050, it is hard to disagree with the need to shift towards retrofitting these buildings and improving their energy efficiency, fire safety and quality for occupants.
This urgent need was the primary reason behind Arup’s recent Retrofit at Scale publication, highlighting the framework required to deliver retrofit at pace and at scale. It also emphasises the scale of opportunity for retrofit to reduce carbon emissions, improve occupants’ comfort and health, and strengthen resilience against extreme weather.
New intentions
Fresh off the back of its election victory, Labour has made its intentions clear to accelerate the path to net zero, cut household energy bills and ensure private rented homes meet minimum energy efficiency standards by 2030. The Warm Homes Plan sets out to achieve these goals, by supporting investment for home insulation, and incentivising low carbon heating. This will be part financed by seeking private sector investment. The new Government has also pledged to facilitate a “rooftop revolution” to deliver rapid roll-out of solar panels on new and existing homes.
Investing in the future
Bringing down the costs of retrofitting is a key tool to make delivery at scale achievable. Through innovations with cheaper materials, techniques, and more efficient implementation, progress is possible. However, all too often, retrofit is associated with the payback of energy alone. This can, by its very nature, take time, and therefore gathering investment can be challenging.
Instead, we must look to the indirect financial benefits of retrofit for health, wellbeing, productivity and climate resilience, along with the non-financial benefits.
The strength of these benefits is even greater if retrofit is delivered at a neighbourhood scale, where multiple place-based challenges can be simultaneously addressed and even multiplied at a strategic level. Delivery can also be better coordinated at this scale to minimise disruption and to make building and infrastructure upgrades efficiently.
Taking all of this into consideration, payback becomes much faster. However, these benefits remain challenging to measure – articulating this value will be vital to attracting investment.
Instil confidence with better data
With billions of capital investment required to retrofit the UK’s homes, private finance institutions and the Government require confidence that their investment will return the intended outcomes for cutting bills, improving energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.
To provide this investor confidence, a robust baseline of data is essential to reliably inform and monitor retrofit delivery. This data baseline should include up-to-date information on building energy consumption, construction and heating system.
This will allow the positive outcomes of retrofit to be monitored more accurately and, nationally, empower the Government to track the decarbonisation of existing buildings to meet the UK’s 2050 net zero target.
With the current data shortfall, there are currently risks of abortive costs, where buildings are incorrectly identified for retrofit or earmarked for the wrong retrofit measures. There are also missed opportunities for continuous learning, and more performance linked targets.
For local authorities and social housing landlords, a robust baseline of data will accurately identify and prioritise homes and buildings for retrofit, according to need and public benefit.
Humans at the centre
If we want to make headway on retrofit delivery, we need to promote the potential that can be harnessed, and showcase the benefit to landlords, owner-occupiers and tenants.
For example, living in sub-standard accommodation can have a significant impact on mental health, as well as poor physical health from poor ventilation and damp. This reduces occupants’ productivity and increases the load on the NHS. Retrofitting could help tackle this, although this is rarely acknowledged.
For individual homeowners, there must be more incentive for them to engage in retrofitting. This may be through lower energy bills and improvement in house prices but, for these benefits alone, the retrofit process may seem incredibly overwhelming and disruptive. For real change, we need more innovation in the mortgage market.
Scaling our supply chains
The benefits of retrofit are there to be realised, hidden behind the task of identifying and building a trusted, scaled up supply chain. Making our homes and infrastructure fit for purpose is paramount, and it’s an issue that transcends political cycles. As things stand, much work is to be done if we are to implement a nationwide, or international, supply chain for retrofitting. We need more innovation, and we need more skills.
As well as significantly increasing skilled workers in the retrofit delivery supply chain, property portfolio project commissioners must also be brought on board. These commissioners have the power to identify and initiate retrofit schemes in multiple locations.
Call for holistic delivery
Retrofit can start from one point but generate a much broader range of benefits. A holistic review at the inception of projects can help identify and test the deliverability of these, minimising costs and disruption, and maximising benefits over the longer term.
