From 2024 to early 2026, we led the Innovate UK funded Transform-ER project to radically rethink the retrofit industry to unlock scale. It has now launched as a Community Interest Company offering a bold new delivery model for landlords. Our strategy and operations director Emily Braham shares the project's origins and why this is just the beginning of the story...
In late 2023, I joined 40 organisations at Innovate UK’s Net Zero Heat: Design Engineering Innovation Lab to develop new ideas to accelerate decarbonised heating.
There I met like-minded souls. People who’ve spent years committed to creating a retrofit sector where homes are updated at speed and scale with cost-effective, high-quality solutions, achieve net-zero targets, and, crucially, result in comfortable, happy residents.
This shared experience came with a shared understanding. That we were nowhere near this vision. And that without systemic change in the industry, we never would be. Despite best intentions, the retrofit industry remains fragmented, characterised by stalled programmes, high costs, dissatisfied residents, and lost trust.
In response, 13 organisations came together to propose Transform. Engage. Retrofit (Transform-ER) - a programme designed to radically rethink how retrofit is delivered. By adopting a systems-thinking approach, we set out to tackle the sector’s biggest barriers and enable a market capable of upgrading 1 million homes a year by 2030.
With funding from Innovate UK secured, we’ve spent the past two years focused on a clear end goal: a cohesive, industrialised retrofit sector delivering high-performance, cost-effective solutions through a standardised, repeatable process.
Led by Energiesprong UK, the Transform-ER consortium includes Ambue, Bow Tie Construction, the London Boroughs of Barking & Dagenham and Hammersmith & Fulham, BRE, KIN, the Manufacturing Technology Centre, Planarific, Tallarna, Tata Steel UK, Ultrapanel Building Technologies, and VundaHaus.
Our hypothesis was simple but ambitious: by aggregating homes into retrofit-ready pipelines of similar typologies, we can reduce costs, improve quality, and unlock the full potential of manufactured and digital solutions.
From the outset, we also committed to reimagining resident engagement - ensuring retrofit is done with people, not to them - and guaranteeing outcomes for decarbonisation, comfort, and health.
Our shared vision was:
Guided by the Construction Innovation Hub’s Demand–Develop–Deploy framework, we wanted to address the interconnected challenges holding the sector back - from rising costs and resident dropouts to delays and disappointing outcomes.
While we brought deep experience of the sector, we knew we could not design a better retrofit model without listening to those most affected: landlords, suppliers, and residents.
We spent significant time understanding your goals, pain points, and needs - and using these insights to shape our rethink of retrofit delivery. What became clear is that the same challenges are causing problems for everyone.
And that by addressing these together - and by moving away from fragmented programmes towards an integrated retrofit ecosystem - everyone stands to benefit. You can dive deep into the insights from our stakeholder engagement on Transform-ER’s website.
We’re now one of the founding members of Transform-ER, which has been launched as a Community Interest Company. Our mission is to enable a thriving retrofit ecosystem capable of delivering 1 million homes a year.
We’ve designed a new integrated delivery model to help social landlords and local authorities procure, finance and deliver high-quality, cost-effective energy upgrades at scale. It’s a model for everyone - based on community and public benefit rather than transactional relationships.
This includes bringing suppliers along with us, improving ways of working for everyone involved, and embedding resident engagement where it belongs: at the heart of retrofit delivery.
We cannot deliver 1 million homes a year alone. We need others in the industry to get onboard with our mission, test our new ways of working and new ideas, feedback and iterate.
Together, we can transform retrofit. We can improve millions of lives - and our own working lives - by moving beyond a broken, fragmented system and building something better. But only if we commit to doing it together.
Find out more about Transform-ER and follow us on Linkedin.
