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The spending review contained positive funding announcements for retrofit but there are now several key steps needed to ensure the benefits are delivered, write Andy Piper, Head of Sustainability and Matthew Turpin, Public Affairs Lead at VIVID.
With the third wave of warm homes grant, Future Homes Standard announcement and government’s commitment to its £13.2bn manifesto pledge to support retrofitting 5m homes, it’s been a positive few months on the Warm Homes front. This is great news for social housing customers as we’ll now start to see some long-awaited, large-scale investment to achieve warmer, healthier and more affordable housing.
In addition, government’s Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) and Decent Homes proposals will introduce energy performance targets for social housing for the first time. This could lead to an acceleration of the energy efficiency and net zero targets set by landlords over the last decade in the absence of national targets.
This greater funding and policy direction is positive progress for the energy efficiency sector. However, given the scale and potential acceleration of delivery that this will bring, this reinforces the need for a more strategic response to the planning of place-based energy efficiency investment. The proposed funding increases also underlines the need for early indication of government’s intentions for deploying investment to enable the sector to mobilise for this delivery.
We ask that government publishes its Warm Homes Plan as soon as possible to give the sector and its supply chains a better understanding of the funding allocations, timescales and delivery structures.
There are several key questions around how we’ll mobilise the sector and its supply chain to deliver energy efficiency at a much larger scale than ever before. We need confirmation about how and when this funding will be allocated. To ensure our customers benefit from this step change in investment, the sector will need time to prepare. An urgent indication of the government’s intentions is needed.
With devolution expected to bring greater decision-making around investment decisions locally, we also consider there’s a real opportunity to improve the planning and co-ordination of strategic energy efficiency projects that benefit all housing tenures. Large scale, place-based schemes offer a more efficient approach to accelerating large scale delivery. Strategic warm homes led investment of entire neighbourhoods would be one way to deploy investment more rapidly than before. An indication of the role of local government in coordinating delivery and deploying grant for future grant programmes would help the sector to understand the partnerships, opportunities to share resources and future contractual arrangements needed.
The next key question is around capacity and skills; is the sector, together with our supply chain, ready to increase the scale of our retrofitting activity? The risks around skills and resources are well known but demonstrable progress now really needs to be made in addressing these. As a result, there’s an important role for the government, and the supply chain given the longer-term funding certainty, to develop the skills and expertise that’s needed to deliver retrofit at scale.
Landlords themselves will also need to ensure that their skills and delivery capacity are adequate to achieve large scale, business as usual energy efficiency delivery. The sector has historically relied upon small teams of sustainability professionals to deliver complex energy efficiency projects that operate independently from traditional asset investment programmes. This siloed approach is often driven by short term grant funding opportunities and rarely delivers the required outcomes. To ensure that we’re taking a ‘no regrets’ approach to delivery that responds to future regulation and delivers grant/internal funding commitments, energy efficiency will need to be fully integrated into asset investment programmes. For providers that are in the early stages of energy efficiency delivery, the complexity that aligning investment programmes, data, systems and delivery teams will bring shouldn’t be underestimated. But the benefits in terms of improving delivery assurance and reducing both customer disruption and delivery costs make this a very worthwhile exercise.
To make sure that the challenges around funding, skills and strategic direction don’t impact delivery, we need to see a Warm Homes Plan come forward from government. Without this longer-term vision and plan, the sector’s efforts to grow the industry and to benefit as many people as possible living with high energy bills in cold homes will remain a challenge. If we’re to see a plan, given the size of the challenge, it’s equally important we see an agency in place that has clear accountability for delivering it in partnership with local authorities and housing associations.
As such, the government needs to recognise that while the commitment confirmed in the Spending Review was seriously welcomed, significant funding needs a clear plan attached. We now need to urge the government to bring forward the Warm Homes Plan and an agency with responsibility for delivering it at some pace, so the committed investment can be effectively maximised, seeing more customers benefitting from warmer homes.