How To Avoid The Compromises That Could Undermine Decarbonising UK Housing

Monday, June 21, 2021

It might not feel like it, but we’re at the relatively easy stage of the programme to retrofit UK social housing to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. Setting out the vision and defining the destination are vital steps, but between where we are and where we need to be there is a vast amount of activity and learning that needs to happen.

As we collectively venture further, the unknown will gradually be replaced by the known. This will include the condition of the UK social housing stock and its suitability for specific retrofit actions. The true scale and complexity of the task can be quantified. What we can’t afford is for this to be the point at which compromises start to be made.

Defining Net Zero Carbon

If net zero carbon doesn’t mean exactly that we will fail to make the impact on climate change that is needed. If the quality of work, materials or (worst of all) safety are compromised by deadlines and costs we are just storing up problems for the future. A focus on quality is essential if we are to avoid the ‘design/energy performance gap’ that would leave us short of the zero carbon goal, despite all the effort.

Although it’s a challenge, zero carbon retrofit of housing is also the best opportunity to reduce UK carbon emissions. Housing accounts for 29% of energy use according to BEIS. Social housing is a highly significant part of that figure.

For Osborne, net-zero carbon housing retrofit involves a long-term no compromise approach. This starts with putting the right foundations in place from the beginning. Success calls for the involvement of many organisations, bringing together expertise in a variety of fields from renewables, energy efficiency surveys, retrofit technologies, logistics, supply chain management, property services and communications. Collaboration is part of how we set ourselves up to succeed.

Measuring Impact

Another key part of the challenge will be to agree on and standardise metrics: focusing on what constitutes a meaningful difference rather than on what’s easiest to measure or most likely to give us a result we like.

Measuring the energy used by a home sounds like a simple concept. But here are just a few of the details to resolve:

At what point do you apply the metric and over which period of the lifecycle?
How do you normalise for different sizes of home, number of occupants or environmental factors?
As a social housing provider, do you aim for net-zero for every property or aggregate performance across the entire stock?

Like everything else in the retrofit programme, solutions are either known or within our power to discover. The more we stick by our principles and avoid the lure of compromises, the better the outcome for everyone.