Case Study B – Housing Retrofit

Context

The United Kingdom has one of the oldest existing housing stocks in Europe (Grey et al., 2017), and with energy performance generally correlating with building age (Karvonen, 2013), it also has one of the most energy inefficient.

UK homes account for 29% of total UK energy demand (BEIS, 2020) and around 22% of UK greenhouse gas emissions (CCC, 2019). Poor quality, energy inefficient housing is also a key and enduring cause of hardship for low income and
vulnerable households. To reach our 2050 net zero ambitions and address the issue of fuel poverty we need to radically and quickly decarbonise the housing stock and make it more energy efficient. However, at current housing replenishment rates of around 2% per year we will be left with 80% of existing stock by 2050 (CCC, 2019.) If we are not going to build new, more energy efficient homes, then we must extensively retrofit our existing stock.

Over the past two decades there have been numerous policy initiatives and programmes designed to improve the energy performance of existing housing in the UK, which to varying degrees have focused on fuel poor households (see
Karvonen, 2013 and Putman and Brown, 2021). Flagship schemes such as Warm Front (2000-2013) and the Green Deal (2013-2015) are among the most prominent features of a complex and fragmented landscape of different policies and
actors. Collectively, these initiatives, while suggesting an acknowledgment of the necessity and wider benefits of retrofitting (see below), have nevertheless largely ‘failed to deliver’ the scale and speed of change required to the UK’s housing stock that our commitment to net zero necessitates (Putnam and Brown, 2021: 1).

Why might this be?

Key Elements of Change

Retrofitting is a complicated and challenging technical, economic and social process. Part of the issue has been the predominance of a techno-economic framing of the problem and an accompanying emphasis on top-down, regulatory
and technical/material, ‘fabric first’ focused solutions.

While these approaches have delivered some quick and ‘easy wins’, with respect to the ‘low hanging fruit’ (see DECC, 2011), they are insufficient to realize the scale of change required. As Karvonen (2013: 568) argues, developing a systemic domestic retrofit agenda in the UK, requires “thinking beyond the technical and economic aspects of domestic energy use”.
Karvonen is among a number of researchers (see also Jankel, 2013; Putnam and Brown, 2021) who have identified and advocated for an alternative framing of retrofit, one that pays greater attention to the social, and one that emphasises a local, community or ‘people first’ approach. These area or place-based approaches attend to issues of procedural justice by empowering households to become active participants in the retrofit process rather than passive targets. Distributive justice is also enacted in enabling fuel poor households with fewer resources and less agency to be included. By involving communities, such approaches are also able to offer solutions that recognise both the physical diversity of housing stock and the distinctiveness of household energy/heating social practices, habits and behaviours that take place within them.

While households are at the forefront, area-based approaches involve a host of supporting and enabling local mid-level actors including local authorities, environmental groups, architects and builders, local fire services etc. Playing a particularly critical role are what Karvonen (2013: 571) refers to as intermediaries. These local intermediaries “bridge the gap between distant government carbon reduction targets and the rhythms of domestic life by developing trust and confidence in the tools, processes and actors involved in domestic retrofit”.

Lessons for Net Zero

Retrofitting homes is key to achieving net zero. It is not an easy solution to reducing carbon and energy demand, but done right, it is one that works. In a large-scale, ex-post evaluation of the Kirklees Warm Zone (KWZ) scheme – an area based community scheme coordinated by the local authority (Kirklees Council) and managed by a not-for-profit local energy company (Yorkshire Energy Services), that ran from 2007-2010 and retrofitted 51,000 homes – Webber et al., (2015) found that retrofitting had a greater effect on domestic energy use in practice than key theoretical models had originally forecast.

They calculated that retrofit associated reductions in energy use resulted in a total carbon saving of 25.1 ktCO2/year. Moreover, it had also led to an average annual saving of £125 (or 10%) per year for each participating household. Despite this clear success, the learning from this and other area-based schemes has not been built on within national policy, although the UK’s devolved administrations did sustain the funding of area-based retrofit initiatives (see, for example, the Scottish Government’s HEEPS schemes and the Welsh Government’s Arbed scheme).The realisable household energy bill savings are significant and illustrate the potential of retrofit to lead to a cascade of other co-benefits, not least of which, is fuel poverty alleviation.

In a longitudinal qualitative study of the lived experiences of fuel poverty, before and after an energy efficiency intervention, Grey et al., (2017: 902) found that such schemes can have a “profound positive impact on wellbeing and quality of life, financial stress, thermal comfort, social interactions and the use of indoor space”. Local retrofit programmes can also have a range of other local economic benefits too, in terms of employment and boosts to local businesses (Brown et al., 2020). Collectively, the environmental, economic and social case for retrofit is compelling but significant barriers to its large-scale roll-out remain.

Among the most persistent of these barriers are issues of trust. Household attitudes to the principle of retrofit are largely positive but practical uptake is impeded by concerns around reliability, outcome quality, and cost-savings (Wilson et al., 2015). This lack of trust also stems, according to Putnam and Brown (2021: 3), from “homogeneity in policy offerings and contractors’ approaches, where measures are chosen without considering the needs of the property and residents”.

Putnam and Brown (2021: 10) note that grassroots, community-governed, retrofit initiatives offer an “alternative to the centralised policy pathway embodied in programmes such as the Green Deal, which failed to deliver residential retrofit at scale in the UK”. Such initiatives, with their emphasis on a place-based, people-centred approach to design and delivery, are proving effective at overcoming many of the trust-related barriers to implementation associated with imposed, top-down schemes. Policy support for locally-led approaches therefore will be critical to advancing the retrofit agenda and unlocking its multiple benefits including those that relate to our net zero ambitions.

Housing Retrofit: Elements of Societal Change

Multi-factor DRIVERS OF CHANGE

• Social justice and equity considerations
• Public health concerns (cold/damp)
• Energy efficiency/consumption

Mid-level ACTORS

• Local authorities
• Local environmental groups
• Local building firms
• Local energy company
• Local Fire and Rescue Service

Galvanising ISSUE

• Fuel poverty and rising energy costs

JUSTICE Considerations

• Procedural and distributional Justice

CONTESTATIONS and CONFLICTS

• Area based vs needs based
• Landlords vs tenants
• Unequal access to funding
• Community vs authority and issues of trust and fear of unintended consequences
• Poor quality work and project management

REFERENCES

• BEIS (2020). Energy Consumption in the UK (ECUK) 1970 to 2019
• Brown, D., Wheatley, H., Kumar, C. & Marshall, J. (2020). A green stimulus for housing: The Macroeconomic Impacts of a UK Whole House Retrofit Programme
• CCC (2019). UK housing: Fit for the future?
• CCC (2019). Reducing UK emissions – 2019 Progress Report to ParliamentCommittee on Climate Change
• Grey, C. N., Schmieder-Gaite, T., Jiang, S., Nascimento, C. & Poortinga, W. (2017). Cold homes, fuel poverty and energy efficiency improvements: a longitudinal focus group approach. Indoor and Built Environment, 26 (7) 902-913
• Jankel, Z. (2013). Delivering and funding housing retrofit: A review of community models.Policy report Arup & Centre of sustainability: United Kingdom
• Karvonen, A. (2013). Towards systemic domestic retrofit: a social practices approach. Building Research & Information, 41 (5) 563-574
• Putnam, T. & Brown, D. (2021). Grassroots retrofit: Community governance and residential energy transitions in the United Kingdom. Energy Research & Social Science 78 102102
• Webber, P., Gouldson, A. & Kerr, N. (2015). The impacts of household retrofit and domestic energy efficiency schemes: A large scale, ex post evaluation. Energy Policy 84 35-43