There is an opportunity to change the way we retrofit to meet the scale, speed and cost required for the climate emergency and millions of people experiencing fuel poverty.
The Mayor of London’s Retrofit Accelerator – Homes (RA-H) programme was designed to help transform the way London upgrades its ageing and energy-inefficient housing to create warm, affordable and ultra-low carbon homes.
Nine social housing providers and four UK building firms, along with a network of suppliers, collaborated to drive market development, tools and a business case to establish a model that could take deep retrofit to scale. The project was led by Energiesprong UK and Turner & Townsend.
120 homes were retrofitted to Energiesprong’s net-zero energy standard. More than 2,000 more homes have been identified for a pipeline of further stages, with an OJEU compliant process for procurement and scale-up. Scale-up is supported by a portfolio of blueprint designs for ultra-low carbon homes across seven London boroughs - and by new technologies and solutions that have been supported to go to market at increased scale and pace.
“The Retrofit Accelerator Homes - Innovation Partnership provided technical and commercial support in a market, which is relatively new, and has given us the confidence to invest both financially and in training of staff.” Michael Axtell, Project Manager, London Borough of Lambeth
ESUK provided a range of services for this project, including:
“I’ve been in the sector for more than 25 years and we talk about it a lot, but this is probably the only example I can give in my career where we have truly collaborated with competitors.” Vicky Fordham-Lewis, former Managing Director of Osborne Property Solutions
As part of the project, we ran a communications campaign to showcase the lessons learned from the project. It shared how the main contractors were leading on new ways of upgrading housing using the Energiesprong model, which results in warm, affordable, ultra-low carbon homes - as well as working to unlock a functioning, self-financing market across the whole of the UK that delivers whole house retrofit at the scale and speed we need.
From collaborating and sharing costs and pioneering industrialisation and MMC to guaranteeing performance long-term, these four contractors – or solution providers – helped shake up the sector.
