Last month, I went on a jungle safari with a difference. My aim was to discover how UK homeowners might slash through a thicket of advice to cut their energy bills and carbon emissions, amid an angry national debate on climate change policy.
This took me to the UK’s first national retrofit conference, held in London.
I know the confusion homeowners face first-hand, and have campaigned to make altering historic homes easier. In October, I’d taken up an offer from Octopus Energy, my avowedly “green” power supplier, to assess my 200-year-old Georgian house’s eligibility for a state-subsidised heat pump.
The utility came back a few days later with the following message: the heat loss from your home is too great. But it was unwilling to suggest additional measures to make a heat pump function efficiently in my home.
“They’re looking for low-hanging fruit,” explained Andy Simmonds, chief executive of the Association for Environment Conscious Building. He was referring in part to the planning restrictions that complicate alterations to heritage homes whose owners are often among those most likely to have the cash to drive demand for green goods and services.
When it comes to general housing stock in the UK, adding carbon-cutting technology comes with additional dangers for the so-called “able to pay” market. In 2021, Citizens Advice counted at least 12 separate accreditation and inspection schemes covering any kind of retrofit activity from energy efficiency to renewables; they were joined last month by another new standard for retrofit, from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
In contrast, all heating engineers must be on the Gas Safe Register even to touch a gas boiler.
In the UK retrofit jungle, TrustMark, a quality scheme for tradespeople that applies to all state-funded retrofit, is the closest beast to a government watchdog. Yet it registered one of the lowest levels of consumer awareness in a 2023 Citizens Advice survey.
Higher up the awareness scale are local councils, which are responsible for deciding whether to allow retrofit work. They maintain, however, that they cannot recommend specific local tradespeople, in spite of their desire to develop local green skills and jobs.
“We can’t advocate for contractors . . . though we know it’s a blocker for residents,” Lambeth council’s head of sustainability Cassidy Travis told a conference session on local leadership. The good news, according to Travis, is that “community groups are starting to share this information with each other”.
Enter the new species on the prowl at the conference: the retrofit co-ordinator. These are professionals with a formal qualification who can devise a plan to retrofit a home and identify contractors to do the work.
“To be a builder in the UK, you can stick a name and a phone number on a van and you’re away,” says Russell Smith, managing director of retrofit co-ordinator Ecofurb, which holds TrustMark (for the process of retrofit) and MCS (for heating systems and renewables) certifications. For £570, Ecofurb says it will deliver an impartial in-home survey and a free quote from a national network of trusted installers.
But even Smith, lead author of an industry-led national retrofit strategy in 2021, is wary of Citizens Advice’s call for a single accreditation and inspection body. “If you’re new to the industry, it’s an absolute minefield . . . but if one organisation were to do it all it could become lazy and expensive,” he said.
Tina Holt, a retrofit adviser from Cumbria, noted that a TrustMark certification was already unaffordable for many small and medium-sized contractors because it covers a wide range of retrofit work. “It all adds up,” says Simmonds, who sees the solution in a co-ordinated landscape with a few players, including the AECB’s own standard.
Some have suggested that finance could play the role of enforcer by approving long-term loans for retrofit work as part of a mortgage. “Banks . . . have a lot of power they can’t yet wield,” said Matthew Boyes of Hometree Finance, a financier of gas boilers that plans to offer heat pump loans.
According to the Green Finance Institute, the UK now has 60 “green” mortgage products. But their share of the mortgage market, put at 2.6 per cent last year by consultants Baringa, is limited by what partner Emily Farrimond describes as “a lack of government policy, consumer awareness and supply chain skills making it too difficult for potential customers to be aware of, or easily access, the improvements available”.
Like most players in the retrofit sector, Aadil Qureshi, chief executive of Heat Geek, a network of heat pump installers and educators, is looking to government to set a coherent strategy to accelerate progress, including the facilitation of a digital approach to assuring quality — for example, monitoring the performance of heat pumps in real time.
The conference was teeming with officials from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, led by Lord Callanan, the minister for energy efficiency and green finance.
But politicians’ flip-flopping on net zero policy ahead of a general election expected later this year — by, for instance, pushing back the deadline for the phasing out of gas boilers — has confined government efforts to a muted public information campaign, policy tweaks and funding for projects, including some public money for the National Retrofit Hub, a promising coordinating body initiated by industry.
In the meantime, Heat Geek has trained 2,000 heating engineers in heat pump installation. This compares with a total of 10,000 trained over the past two years, and 60,000 that the country would need to give all 28mn homes in the UK a heat pump. But the venture capital-backed start-up, which provides a service similar to retrofit co-ordinators (£350 for a basic plan), is also taking the fight to the detractors of heat pumps.
When Roger Bisby, a builder-turned-TV personality, published a YouTube video condemning the technology, Heat Geek invited him to watch it fix a poorly installed heat pump he had cited as evidence. Bisby was publicly converted on Heat Geek’s YouTube channel. Countering a cacophony of doubt — some of it stemming from bad practice by bad actors — matters.
Yet while a fledgling industry is already growing from the ground up, only central government guidance can ensure citizens, utilities, lenders and local authorities play their full part in the green energy transition. What this wild landscape needs now is a safari co-ordinator, armed with a 10-15 year itinerary, that cannot be ditched with every change of government.
This article has been altered to clarify that the National Retrofit Hub did not organise the retrofit conference.