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 – so let us introduce…us!
Back in June we shared the first in our Meet the Transform-ERs Q&A blogs with Ambue’s Neil Hooton, which explored its role as the project’s “data democratiser.” Next up: our very own Emily Braham who is going to dive deep into how – and why – collaboration is the key ingredient in Transform-ER's new retrofit delivery vehicle.
Transform-ER (Transform.Engage.Retrofit) is a game-changing project funded by Innovate UK that’s tackling retrofit’s biggest barriers to scale. It brings together a tactical team of 13 industry-leading organisations to achieve a shared mission: a cohesive, industrialised sector that delivers high-performance, cost-effective solutions through a standardised process.
This series provides a peek into what’s happening behind the scenes - spotlighting the barriers we’ve identified to retrofit at scale, showcasing how to tackle them and sharing useful insights!
It’s no secret that the retrofit industry in the UK has struggled to flourish. There are multiple factors – stop-start funding, a lack of clarity in government policy, complicated supply chains, inadequate finance options, labour and skills shortages and increasing construction costs to name just a few.
Transform-ER is designed to take a step back and look at these challenges as an interconnected system - identifying the mechanisms that could help tackle them collectively. Underpinning the whole project is the formation of a Community Interest Company to provide an equitable and structured ‘profit for purpose’ market vehicle.
It’s designed to help deliver retrofit schemes more efficiently – unlocking new income streams, creating a suite of contracts to revolutionise procurement, fostering culture change to transform how we deal with risk and radically improving resident engagement. Simple right? Read on to find out how we’re going about it…
Last year, I received a tantalisingly tempting invitation from Innovate UK – to join a range of industry experts at its Net Zero Heat: Design Engineering Innovation Lab. The opportunity couldn’t have come at a better time as we were facing a bit of a crossroads at Energiesprong UK.
We’ve spent several years focused on developing our retrofit market to scale the Dutch Energiesprong model that’s worked so well in the Netherlands - delivering deep retrofit ‘in one go’ using innovative solutions to create comfortable, desirable, net-zero homes that are financed by energy and maintenance savings.
Coming to the end of some major projects, we’d spent time reflecting on what we’d learned and what was next. We’d had many successes – helping deliver ground-breaking projects that resulted in innovation, scale and collaboration.
Current market structures are not only ineffective at nurturing innovation – they are in fact geared towards maintaining the status quo. So, Transform-ER is designed to tackle all these challenges in one fell swoop by radically transforming how we do things!
But ultimately, we had to face the hard truth that sector barriers mean the model just isn’t working easily in a UK context, especially because the industry has been slow to adopt more modern methods of construction which are critical to cost-effective, high-quality, rapid-to-install retrofit solutions.
Current market structures are not only ineffective at nurturing innovation – they are in fact geared towards maintaining the status quo. So, Transform-ER is designed to tackle all these challenges in one fell swoop by radically transforming how we do things!
This mission fits perfectly with our freshly defined strategy to collaborate with partners to catalyse new approaches for outcome-led home retrofit, so every UK home can be desirable, comfortable, affordable and fit for 2050 net-zero standards.
It’s a truly systemic intervention. Since the beginning of Energiesprong UK, we’ve championed new ways of contracting, procuring, managing risk and securing finance as key to unlocking home energy upgrades at scale. But so far, we haven’t quite nailed this in practice.
We’ve learned a lot through previous schemes and paired with our partners’ expertise and in-depth research and stakeholder engagement, the Transform-ER project has allowed us to take the ideas to the next level.
Our current value proposition is to transform the process of home energy refurbishment for all stakeholders – from engagement through to post-occupancy monitoring - so that it’s outcome-led, streamlined, efficient and creates an appealing purchasing proposition for customers.
Our initial focus has been bringing all our collective insights together about previous retrofit schemes – what’s worked and what hasn’t - as well as conducting stakeholder engagement to find out what landlords, solution providers, the supply chain and residents need from a delivery vehicle.
It’s clear that we need to rethink things like contracting and procurement to unlock successful, multi-stakeholder retrofit schemes...
It’s clear that we need to rethink things like contracting and procurement to unlock successful, multi-stakeholder retrofit schemes, especially if we want to involve SMEs. But it’s also clear from our research into forward-thinking contracting and procurement models that culture change is equally important.
For example, both Heathrow T5 and Project 13 incentivised a ‘problem-solving mindset’ by sharing profit and risk across the supply chain. This created a ‘no blame’ culture where the parties were incentivised to find solutions for problems jointly, rather than to protect their own commercial interests.
We’ve also looked at the concept of insurance-backed alliancing, introduced through our interview with Rudi Klein. Insurance can be used to insure risk of overspend and PI – helping support a ‘no-blame culture.”
So, alongside the more process-orientated elements, we’ve been exploring how to facilitate a much-needed shift towards a more collaborative culture in the sector. This has included a questionnaire to gain qualitative feedback on levels of trust between key stakeholders.
One word I have been hearing time and time again throughout our research and stakeholder engagement is ‘trust.’
At the heart of truly collective working is trust and this requires a level of openness I think we rarely achieve as an industry.
We hear it from landlords who need to be able to trust that contractors can deliver projects on-time and to budget. We hear it from residents who need to trust that their interests are being truly considered. We hear it from the supply chain who need to trust that if they invest in creating a solution it will be used at scale.
We've long championed collaboration as essential to creating retrofit at scale – simply put, without it we will fail. But at the heart of truly collective working is trust and this requires a level of openness I think we rarely achieve as an industry.
So, my call to action is that we all need to be more honest with each other. Honest about our lessons learned, honest about cost, honest about disruption and honest about our needs. We saw the beginnings of this during the Mayor of London’s Retrofit Accelerator – Homes Innovation Partnership and it was a truly remarkable shift.
This shift will be a specific focus for us at ESUK as we move forward with helping to develop the delivery vehicle. We’ll also be trying to walk the talk at ESUK over the next few months as we share some of our reflections from our work over the last eight years and how we’re shifting our strategy in line!
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!
