13 partners, 18 months, one mission: our new consortium-led Transform-ER project aims to enable one million home upgrades every year by 2030. This blog series will tell the stories of our tactical team of partners and the retrofit barriers they are addressing - first up, Ambue's Neil Hooton explains why improving housing portfolio data is critical.
Back in April, we launched Transform-ER (Transform.Engage.Retrofit) - a game-changing, consortium-led project funded by Innovate UK that’s tackling retrofit’s biggest barriers to scale to enable one million home upgrades every year by 2030.
It’s brought together 13 partners - a tactical team of industry-leading organisations. We all have different skills and motivations but share the same mission: creating a cohesive, industrialised sector that delivers high-performance, cost-effective solutions through a standardised process.
Through our “Meet the Transform-ERs” Q&A series, we’ll provide a peek into what’s happening behind the scenes with each of the partners. Follow along as we spotlight the barriers we’ve identified to retrofit at scale, showcase what needs to happen to tackle them and share insights you might find useful!
The Transform-ER project is divided into 8 work packages that use the Demand – Develop – Deploy structure to concurrently develop systemic solutions for interconnected challenges.
Work package 1 – led by Ambue, Tallarna and Planarific - is exploring pipeline demand, matching and project generation. It’s developing new digital tools and approaches to assessing portfolios, categorising typologies, aggregating demand, identifying retrofit performance risk, and enabling standardisation.
The aim? Developing more accurate stock data, reducing risk and enabling visibility of pipelines and matching properties to appropriate measures and product systems.
Our mission is to simplify the process of social housing decarbonisation – making retrofit easier for landlords but also reducing resident bills and ensuring their homes are safe and healthy. Our team of architects, designers and computer scientists use our in-house software platform to standardise and automate the PAS2035 delivery process.
Our mission is to simplify the process of social housing decarbonisation
We’re involved in Transform-ER because we’re motivated by accelerating the UK’s zero carbon journey! You just need to do a few quick calculations to understand the immense scale of what needs to be done in a relatively short space of time – we really need to step things up a gear.
But it’s also of interest to us from a business perspective. There’s a massive marketplace potential for delivering retrofit and Transform-ER is an opportunity for us to explore and develop our portfolio assessment technology and understand how we can meet the scale of the challenge using the Ambue process automation approach.
Transform-ER’s ambition is to reach 300,000 retrofits per year initially – rising to 1 million per year by 2030. That requires access to a lot of data. And not just any data, we need good-quality data that landlords, solution providers and the supply chain alike can trust to ensure high-performance, cost-effective home upgrades and to drive down costs through identifying economies of scale.
Unfortunately, data quality varies wildly in this sector. So, one of the first things we are doing as part of Transform-ER is addressing this because, at the most basic level, different partners need to know they are talking about the same property! Once we can start trusting data on an individual property level, you can start trusting it at scale and this will help unlock a much-needed portfolio and area-based approach to retrofit.
We’re also championing data interoperability to create a ‘golden thread’ of data throughout the whole retrofit process so all partners can access what they need to know in the format they need it in. This will help achieve the efficiencies required for retrofitting 1 million homes per year by 2030 by optimising and integrating data with their particular design, specification or management process.
We are starting at the beginning of the challenge by developing a portfolio and pipeline assessment platform to underpin Transform-ER’s new standardised process.
There are ~26 million homes to retrofit in one way or another in the UK and there lots of products – and often quite innovative products - to achieve help this.
But every type of property will have several potential routes to net zero – there are different choices that can be made, and these will be dependent on the funding streams available. So how can property owners match the right products to the right properties at the right price using the right funding stream?
Focusing on social housing, we’re trying to make this process easier by bringing together as many good-quality data points as possible to provide appropriate suggestions for landlords so they can make the right choices for their budgets and their properties.
You can think about it like turning on Netflix or Amazon Prime and seeing your ‘recommendations!’
You can think about it like turning on Netflix or Amazon Prime and seeing your ‘recommendations!’ And in fact, we are applying some of the same underlying technology and algorithms that sit behind these services.
Stakeholder engagement is a crucial initial focus for the project because we want to ensure that any solutions the project develops will meet the needs of its user groups.
So, we’ve been digging deep into what’s needed from the data and have started to fully grasp some of the common challenges across the retrofit ecosystem that we can address. The data quality is poor and if I am honest, in some places, it’s more inconsistent than I thought it would be. We really need to help gain back trust in that data through rigorous data cleansing, enrichment and real-life feedback loops.
We’ve also discovered a lot about the needs of the supply chain. It’s relatively easy to put yourself in the shoes of a homeowner or resident when it comes to retrofit because you can understand the kind of things that you’d be concerned about. So, it’s useful to hear from manufacturers and contractors – how are they accessing the market, what are the red flags, what are their risks?
Ultimately, it’s an exercise in prioritisation. We’re asking as many questions as possible to identify the biggest problems we can solve and the most value we can generate for all the different stakeholders to catalyse real-life transformation.
And that’s what’s great about this project. It’s a safe space for us to test our theories, learn from what works and fail fast and try another tactic.
And that’s what’s great about this project. It’s a safe space for us to test our theories, learn from what works and fail fast and try another tactic. What we are trying to do is hard. We will find barriers and things that don’t work but that means by the time we are putting it into practice, we will have worked out how to get it right.
First, I’d like to see the industry realise there is a big market opportunity! And there’s more than enough space for all the different players. Transform-ER is about opening up and enabling that market.
The urgency of achieving our climate goals means we need to understand the wider picture of what the market requires for success.
But we must take a collaborative approach. It’s not just about focusing on your own organisation and what your priorities are – the urgency of achieving our climate goals means we need to understand the wider picture of what the market requires for success.
On a much more micro, data-centric level, my call to action would be for all organisations in the sector to use the Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRN) as held by the Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG). This is the central corporate database for all addressing used in a local authority and is requested by DESNZ for reporting on grant funded schemes.
It sounds simple but it’s a real challenge if different stakeholders can’t align on how they are referring to their properties. It’s the starting point for creating more trust and transparency in the data and the key to unlocking area-based retrofit and wider regeneration at scale.
You can sign up for updates on Transform-ER via the mailing list at the bottom of the project page. Stay tuned for our next blog in the Meet the Transform-ERs series!
