13 partners, 18 months, one mission: our new consortium-led Transform-ER project aims to enable a retrofit sector with one million home upgrades every year by 2030.
Taking a systemic approach to change, it’s tackling the sector’s multiple, interconnected challenges to create a cohesive, industrialised sector that delivers high-performance, cost-effective solutions through a standardised process.
As explored in our recent Q&A with Energiesprong UK’s Emily Braham, creating a culture of collaboration and trust is vital to the success of this mission. As part of this, we’ve ensured that stakeholder engagement has been the starting point for many of the project’s key interventions.
As our Stakeholder Engagement lead, I’ve been on the frontline of this work – co-ordinating interviews and workshops with project partner Ambue to understand landlords’ experiences of retrofit, to directly shape the development of two key project deliverables:
Creating a stakeholder engagement strategy was one of the first things we did in Transform-ER – mapping out the key groups of people and organisations whose voices must be heard in the development of a new retrofit system. And top of the list was landlords.
Social housing landlords own 4.4m homes in the UK, many with similar archetypes. They have net zero and fuel poverty targets and want to provide healthy, comfortable homes for their millions of residents.
Through a series of interviews and workshops, a number of landlords have kindly given up their time to help us explore the challenges they’ve faced in the retrofit projects they’ve delivered so far and what has worked well. The topics we’ve covered include stock analysis, data, risk, contracting, delivery approaches and resident engagement.
It’s clear from our research that it’s not been easy for landlords to upgrade their stock so far, for myriad reasons. Cost escalation, challenges engaging leaseholders, geographically dispersed stock, programme delays, tenant dissatisfaction and drop-outs, inaccurate data, and procurement frameworks that aren’t fit for purpose are just some of the ‘pains’ landlords have faced.
Most social landlords have targets to reach EPC C for all their stock by 2030 or a specific heat demand target across their portfolio, with a focus on addressing fuel poverty and not increasing bills for their tenants.
We asked all landlords the same question during our interviews: what do you need from a revised retrofit system to make your work easier? Some of the responses were:
Transform-ER is aiming to meet these needs by developing a clear, streamlined end-to-end process for delivering cost-effective retrofit, based on accurate data and budget certainty that enables a long-term costed plan to decarbonise portfolios.
We’re considering the common themes that have emerged through the research process as we develop the key ‘threads’ of the Transform-ER project - including the data platform, new contracting and commercial models, and strategy for resident engagement.
This is a major challenge for landlords. When data held on properties doesn’t accurately reflect their architecture, condition or EPC rating, this is problematic for scoping and costing retrofit works. And when unexpected challenges arise, delays and increased costs usually follow.
Transform-ER’s response: Starting with data, the project is developing a platform that can assess portfolios and provide a viable pipeline of properties matched with suitable measures and products that help the landlord meet their decarbonisation or EPC targets. The ability to provide a ‘menu’ of recommendations to the landlord is something that’s cropped up frequently in our discussions as a key request. You can find out more about the data and digitisation work from our previous interview with Neil Hooton from Ambue.
Some landlords have an allocated budget for retrofit, while for others it’s incorporated into capital expenditure programmes. The Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) has helped many landlords, but some have mentioned inflexible timeframes for delivery and pressures to make decisions led by funding requirements.
Transform-ER’s response: We’ve been exploring different borrowing options for landlords and looking into alternative contracting and deployment models that could help manage risks and foster better collaboration between parties. Emily Braham talks more about this in our recent interview on collaboration and trust.
We will be testing some innovative approaches with landlords and the supply chain in the coming weeks to ensure what we create will work for them.
Striking the balance between engaging residents early to get them on board while managing their expectations about what work can be done and when is tricky. Landlords don’t want to overpromise or raise expectations at the start if it’s still unknown what funding is available, which homes can be included in a programme, or when work is likely to start. If the process takes too long, there’s a risk of tenants dropping out or even getting ‘engagement fatigue’; which means being overloaded with information or having appointments and surveys over a long period of time before any work starts.
Transform-ER's response: Residents are at the heart of all the work we’re doing. We recognise that retrofit is often something people feel is ‘done to’ rather than with them. Our previous resident research has shown that if the process isn’t managed well, it can leave them feeling frustrated and disappointed. Even when they recognise that it’s improved their lives by upgrading their homes to be warmer, healthier and more energy efficient.
We began this journey by engaging with landlords because we need to understand the minutiae of why the processes that underpin our current retrofit system simply don’t work.
But even if we address the majority of these with a freshly designed system, it will fail if we do not take resident needs into account.
This understanding has shaped all our work with landlords, and alongside this work we have been developing a resident engagement strategy that aims to create a resident journey that helps residents feel empowered and excited about retrofit. We are testing this strategy with frontline delivery staff such as Resident Liaison Officers (RLOs) to get their valuable input. Then we will be running feedback sessions with residents as part the next stage of the strategy development.
We look forward to sharing more insights about this work in the not-too-distant future!
You can sign up for updates on Transform-ER via the mailing list at the bottom of our project page.
Transform-ER (Transform.Engage.Retrofit) is a game-changing, consortium-led project funded by Innovate UK that’s tackling retrofit’s biggest barriers to scale - enabling one million home upgrades every year by 2030.
