13 partners, 18 months, one mission: our consortium-led Transform-ER project aims to enable one million home upgrades every year by 2030. This blog series tells the stories of our tactical team of partners and the retrofit barriers they are addressing – so let us introduce KIN, our innovation integrator.

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Last year, we began our Meet the Transform-ERs series, showcasing our tactical team of partners working to revolutionise retrofit.

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‍Now, we’re catching up with Alex Whitcroft, Director at KIN® to delve deeper into why transforming how the retrofit industry works is key to enabling scale.  

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As one of the partners focused on creating a new retrofit delivery vehicle, KIN®’s experience of integrating innovation into schemes is invaluable. Here, Alex shares their insights into improving procuring and delivery processes through better collaboration and why this can create smoother projects and reduce costs.  

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Can you tell us about Kin®?

We are architects and developers that offer multidisciplinary innovation consultancy. A core thread of our work is providing ‘one-stop-shop’ or turnkey solutions for councils, community groups or landowners that want to deliver sustainable or social outcomes – including community-led and affordable housing.

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This includes developing new net-zero carbon homes on infill sites or rooftops to enable and cross-fund retrofit and block or estate improvements. We’ve also worked with manufacturers to develop and improve systems for offsite manufacturing and used it on projects to help deliver these sustainable outcomes.  

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We’ve worked with Energiesprong UK for several years now, initially through the Mustbe0 design competition, and later to explore new approaches to retrofitting challenging archetypes including apartment blocks and non-traditional homes.  

Optimising offsite for retrofit and developing a procurement/contracting model with integrated design-and-deliver and risk-and-reward sharing (to reduce cost and improve scalability and outcomes) were key parts of that work.

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Can you talk more about why changing how the retrofit sector works is so critical for scale?

Retrofit remains a complex and often opaque process, whether for individual homeowners or large housing providers.  

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• There’s no standard process – everyone does things a bit differently. Even one-stop-shops often aren’t really one-stop shops – often essentially consultancies providing high-level advice or management.

• There’s very little outcome or cost certainty at the start, which makes it difficult for building owners to commit – especially to large numbers of homes. It’s expensive and grant funding is complex – especially for tenures like flats where eligibility can vary from one house to the next.  

• Once onsite it’s often very disruptive and takes a long time. And householders often don’t know a lot about retrofit and need to be brought on the journey with you, requiring community engagement.  

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And this is just for a standard retrofit project! Delivering retrofit in more complicated dwellings – blocks or flats, heritage properties, non-traditional archetypes - add more challenges.  Especially when remediation is required first.  

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This means a difficult-to-understand process, with complications and challenges only revealed as you reach each individual step – often with the disappointing realisation that it’s going to cost more or take more time.

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So, it’s nigh-on-impossible to build a big predicable pipeline of projects – which, in-turn, leads to a limited supply chain, lack of manufacturing capacity and workforce shortages because no-one wants to invest in an unpredictable pipeline.

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We’ve identified that different approaches to procurement, including incorporating more collaborative approaches, is a key lever for seamlessly scaling up roll-out of retrofit.  

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Can you talk more about that?

Often retrofit projects are procured as design-and-build (D&B) contracts somewhere in the RIBA Stage 3 to Stage 4 window.  We’ve spoken to so many housing portfolio owners and hear the same things – that this go-to model is expensive and doesn’t deliver best value, it’s non-collaborative and they lose control, it doesn’t protect them against costs from abnormals, it doesn’t provide repeatable archetype design or capture learning or scale well, it doesn’t handle community engagement well... the list goes on.  It’s just ‘the way things are done’.  Isn’t there a better way?!  

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Well, yes, there is. It just takes doing things a little bit differently, including how we conceive projects, using collaborative contracting/alliancing and incorporating an integrated design-and-delivery model. Essentially, the key differences are:

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• Early collaboration across disciplines: Designers, constructors, and manufacturers working together from the start. People and companies are selected based on their ability to collaborate – often a culture shift for many organisations in the industry.

• Balanced risk and reward: Moving towards shared incentives, rather than adversarial contract structures.  By aligning commercial incentives through risk and reward sharing we can shift from a blame-assignment to a 'yes it’s solvable’ team culture.

• Scalability through pipeline contracting: Treating retrofit as an ongoing process, rather than isolated projects.  In this model the delivery team can ideally seamlessly ‘draw down’ pre-committed homes to retrofit, from a pipeline, at the pace they can tackle them rather than the stop-start of disconnected projects. This gives the supply chain the confidence it needs to invest and scale.

• Feeding back and centralising learning: Moving to a ‘design panel’ model where we can create and refine solutions more centrally providing more ‘off the shelf’ information and certainty right at the start of projects and reducing the work (and risk) for delivery teams.

• Rolling problem solving budget: Re-envisioning contingency budget as a rolling pot across a pipeline rather than site/project specific, and giving the delivery team authority to draw on this as a ‘problem solving budget’ to tackle site discoveries without always having to stop work to seek approval.

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This approach that we might call ‘pipeline alliancing’ using collaborative contracts with the right incentive structures, underpinned by continuously improved archetype-based designs, empowered teams, and a strong pre-committed pipeline that can be drawn down from can ensure better value for money, improve scalability, and drive long-term innovation rather than short-term cost-cutting, and (importantly) support the supply chain to scale into tackling the retrofit challenge.

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What have you learned through the Transform-ER project so far?

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One major lesson we’ve seen from reviewing case studies and lessons learned from previous projects is that focusing too much on high-performance targets without careful procurement planning and transparency on client budget can backfire if it results in late-stage cut-and-slash cost cutting.

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I know this is something that Energiesprong UK has found as well – rigid performance requirements are hard to guarantee exactly across 10s or 100s of retrofits with varying abnormals and so lead to inflated costs. A more flexible and trust-based approach allows for creating balanced/optimised solutions that are cost-effective and scalable (editor’s note: yes, we agree and this is something we as ESUK will be sharing more on the future)!

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Another key takeaway is that the industry almost always prioritises upfront capital cost per unit struggling to think in terms of over whole-life value, or even to distinguish between per-unit spend (installing measures) and one-off spend (e.g. archetype design at the start of a roll-out programme than that will make the rest of the delivery cheaper and smoother).

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What is your call to action for the retrofit sector?

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It’s widely accepted that current practices aren’t effective and aren’t going to solve retrofit at scale.  So,  let’s have the courage to work together fundamentally differently:

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• Commit pipelines not projects: This means creating large pre-committed pipelines of buildings that can be seamlessly drawn down, enabling delivery teams to move as fast as possible and the supply chain to invest and scale up. Lessons are retained for future projects, allowing iterative improvements.

• Roll-out solutions: Design detailed, repeatable archetype-based solutions up front and then roll-them out continuously improving them.  This means designers, constructors, and the supply chain in the room from the beginning with transparency on budget and trusted to come up with the right solution through frank and honest conversations about what’s achievable and what’s not, what are must-have outcomes and what the trade-offs might need to be – all underpinned by a risk and reward sharing incentive system and long-term relationships.

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Find out more about KIN.

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Sign up for updates about Transform-ER.

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