Round Table Review: Exploring Solutions for Decarbonising Social Housing 17
Government “has banned purchasing systems,” under a certain threshold, replacing them with ‘dynamic marketplaces,’ but this “really stifl es innovation.”
JOINED-UP PROCUREMENT Graham Collie asked the panel’s views on collaborative procurement’s role in decarbonisation projects. He explained: “Joined-up procurement, where clients pool resources and align specifi cations, can deliver far better outcomes, so what more can we do as framework providers to help with collaboration to unlock innovation and consistency?” However other delegates said that integrating teams, despite the benefi ts of
reducing duplication, also created problems, in a complex picture of service suppliers and frameworks. Alison Skillen from Turner and Townsend said the sector “keeps talking about this mythical thing called joint procurement; but you always seem to hit the barriers around who’s taking the risk, and what you do when there’s a quality problem; who owns that?” Ruth Dent said: “At some point someone has to crunch the numbers and do the business case.” Paul Norman advocated engaging with people such as main contractors:
“T ey are probably your best friends; most of us rely on our contractors to bring innovation.” Skillen said there were “huge numbers” of consortiums across the sector, because “it makes very little sense for [providers] to do procurement on their own…we can’t aff ord for every organisation to lead on innovation.” She admitted there were challenges around other bodies taking on upgrades however, and Matt Baird confessed that sometimes “it was hard to get past housing providers’ egos.” Graham Collie gave an example of Scottish collaboration, where providers
worked together across Dumfries and Galloway, but each one individually undertook the resulting contracts, setting up a hub and bringing in other teams as needed. Tania Jennings summed up her approach to avoiding reinventing the wheel across the sector: “I’m a big fan of draconian models, I’d love it if Government said, ‘just hit this standard, no excuses, thank you.”
CONCLUSION As the industry embarks on the fourth wave of Warm Homes Fund projects, with the PAS2035 standard for ensuring retrofi t quality now in force, the £6bn Warm Homes fund barely scratches the surface of the net zero goal. But it is a major step in the right direction, helping elevate whole estates and securing residents against fuel poverty. Delegates thought that to counter the concerns around disruption, promoting the lifestyle, comfort and cost benefi ts property upgrades to residents could
be fundamental. For providers, the focus may be a whole-area benefi t, but for individual residents, it was about empowering them by “helping people understand what was available,” in Jennings’ words. But, as she stressed, building the essential trust was also about “being really transparent about what we can and can’t do.”
THE ROUND TABLE’S RECOMMENDATIONS
• Elaine Middleton, Livin Housing: Don’t wait for Government to tell you to do it, use your asset intelligence and people and work out what you can do, how you can do it, and go from there.
• Mark Owen, WMS Underfl oor Heating: I would like to see Government put what they’re saying into action.
• Christian Dimbleby, White Arkitekter: Sort out electricity pricing. If they really want decarbonisation, we need to make it cost eff ective to use renewable sources of heating.
•
Alison Skillen, Turner & Townsend: I would like to see continued support for the strategy between waves, we need to move away from the stop-start.
• Sarah Daly, Agile Homes: I’d like to see a regional approach, where every region knows exactly what it needs to do and how those skills and supply chains and everything else will feed into an overall delivery model.
•
Stephen Tracy, Wates: Policy cohesion – all those areas such as education and housing where they’re all crossing over, need to get their heads together and make it work.
• Alison Haigh, Buttress Architects: There’s a continuous focus on capital costs rather than long term savings; if you could switch to that, there’d be a lot more improvement on carbon. Also, we need to make retrofi t business as usual and not a specialist term.
• Ben Smith, Mira Showers: We need to link legislation across the industry.
• Richard Ellis, Peabody: We need to bring down the cost of electricity.
• Graham Collie, LHC Procurement Group: Work with the devolved nations; take the lessons learned and apply them everywhere else. And unlock the Procurement Act so we can sort of the innovation side of it.
• Tania Jennings, Lewisham Council: We need a fi rm and binding end date for gas, not just for new build, but for retrofi t as well. When councils cannot put a new like for like boiler into because that is genuinely the biggest barrier to us innovating. And remove the cost caps on these grant funded programmes; we need deep retrofi t funding so that we don’t end up considering buildings to have an end of life.
• Paul Norman,Clarion Housing Group: Pick a policy line through to 2050; make it law, stick to it.
• Ruth Dent, Re:gen Group: We know what to do. There isn’t a silver bullet for this, and I think we just need to keep pressing forward and heading in the right direction, rather than trying to tick boxes.
• Stewart Thompson, Intergas Heating: My message to Government is, stop being selfi sh. Look beyond your parliamentary term and do what’s right for the country.
• Georgina Sommerville, Green Rose CIC: For the sector; use the resources you have, especially your community resources. And to manufacturers, go beyond ‘we have this product, or we fi t this product,’ pre-empt some of the answers to the questions you’re going to be asked, and fi nd out what HAs and tenants want.
Housing Management & Maintenance December/January 2026
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