Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund Wave 3 – learning lessons from past retrofits to shape warm homes
Alex Jahanshahi-Edlin, associate director at McBains, examines how insights from past retrofit programmes should shape the next phase of social housing decarbonisation
Alex Jahanshahi-Edlin is associate director at McBains
With some of the oldest and worst-insulated housing stock in Europe, and amid a fuel poverty crisis, effectively retrofitting the UK’s housing stock has never been more critical.
As demand for social homes continues to significantly outstrip supply, bringing our existing homes up to standard is not only necessary for reaching net zero, but also to ensure the most vulnerable in our society have access to warm and safe homes.
According to research by the Building Research Establishment, cold homes are the largest housing-related cost burden to the NHS. An estimated £500m was spent in 2023 treating cold-related illnesses caused by homes in the lowest Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Bands F and G.
Alongside this, recent reports have highlighted deficiencies in the retrofit installation and accreditation processes, with prudent questions being asked about the systems in place to validate outcomes and the quality of installations and installers.
In short, retrofitting to a high standard is key to addressing a range of public health, well-being and environmental concerns.
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The Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund (WH:SHF) Wave 3 is an extension of the previous waves of grant funding established by the government to address this and accelerate the delivery of retrofit in social and public housing stock.
With £1.29bn allocated in the Autumn Budget, eligible social housing landlords have access to dedicated funding for decarbonisation and to tackle fuel poverty over the next three years.
However, previous funding waves under the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) have shown that funding alone is no silver bullet for overnight change. Social housing in the UK is among the most difficult to decarbonise at scale for a myriad of reasons, from construction to planning constraints and complex tenancy structures.
“With £1.29bn allocated in the Autumn Budget, eligible social housing landlords have access to dedicated funding for decarbonisation and to tackle fuel poverty over the next three years”
For example, many social homes are highly thermally inefficient, often built using traditional techniques featuring solid walls and uninsulated floors and roof voids.
In the case of large retrofit programmes of 100 dwellings or more, it is likely that there will be dwellings of differing construction, local and planning constraints, protected status, typologies and a range of tenancy arrangements – particularly in blocks of flats where the grant recipient does not own all the dwellings.
Based on experience of submitting SHDF bids and delivering SHDF-funded, PAS 2035-compliant retrofit programmes, for example with the Islington and Shoreditch Housing Association during Wave 2.1, I have seen these variations and more.
Robust retrofit assessments provide the quality of information needed to make decisions on what measures are suitable at a dwelling level. EPC ratings do not tell the whole story. A thorough PAS 2035 assessment and visual inspections are crucial in determining the true suitability of measures to either validate or challenge the high-level assumptions made at the bid stage.
No programme has been undertaken without requiring flexibility to assess and replace dwellings found to be EPC C or higher, rendering them largely unavailable for funding. Knowing the true characteristics of a housing stock is the greatest foundation a provider can have.
Listed buildings and those in conservation areas face additional constraints. This complicates efforts to install external wall insulation, solar PVs and, in some cases, internal retrofit measures – reducing the viable options to achieve an EPC C or above. Party walls and planning approvals can also cause delays and increase costs, with restrictions often placed on external and internal wall insulation.
“Clear and consistent communication of the benefits of retrofitting directly to tenants… is a crucial piece of the puzzle to ensure that they feel part of the journey”
Another key consideration for housing providers is securing buy-in from residents. The vulnerability of social housing residents means that any retrofit work must be handled with care and sensitivity.
Previous projects have highlighted how long-term tenants may resist change, especially if previous work was disruptive. Clear and consistent communication of the benefits of retrofitting directly to tenants, including energy bill savings and improved health outcomes, is a crucial piece of the puzzle to ensure that they feel part of the journey.
It is also important to acknowledge that tenants can change in the time that a programme is live, and with them, building-level interventions can alter the fabric or services of the dwelling. This is why robust gateways must be in place to reevaluate and reassess retrofit designs and measure modelling.
The launch of WH:SHF Wave 3 presents a timely opportunity to scale up retrofitting efforts to address these practical challenges. While the application of grant funding for retrofit through PAS 2035 compliance is still in its relative infancy, the lessons learned from previous phases of work should inform future delivery and improve best practices across the sector.
Only by encouraging transparent knowledge sharing and collaboration between providers, embracing the value of existing professional disciplines (eg chartered architects and building surveyors) and investing in green skills can the large-scale transformation required to meet future social housing needs and ensure climate resilience be achieved.
Alex Jahanshahi-Edlin, associate director, McBains
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