20 SOLUTIONS FOR LOW ENERGY DOMESTIC RETROFIT AT SCALE ROUND TABLE REVIEW
TRADITIONAL VALUES
Cypren Edmunds of the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance (second from left, with Ben Whiterod of Social Infrastructure to his right, and RIck Clarke of NIBE and Brian Berry of the Federation of Master Builders to his left), puts the case for developing skills in retrofi tting historic buildings
Laura Morgan-Forster said that it was problematic to expect simple answers regarding the impact of retrofi t technologies in each setting, but data was increasingly being used to help inform consumers. She said she had recently been involved in the new CIBSE Technical Memorandum around heat pump performance, and it’s “actually incredibly complicated.” She added:“Getting one very precise fi gure is not easy, but it offers an opportunity to understand a building, but not necessarily what you’re going to do.” One number isn’t going to tell you how to improve your heat transfer coeffi cient, but it’s still part of a picture of creating more data and better understanding.”
Standards, quality & regulation PAS2035, the new British Standard covering retrofi t, including retrofi t assessments air-tightness, and ventilation plus a new Retrofi t Coordinator role, has been a further missed opportunity, said delegates. Simon Kemp said it’s “kind of perverse that they didn’t mandate it, because the thing was designed to protect individual consumers, and the Government’s adopted it where you actually had pretty reasonable controls across many of the programmes already.”
Brian Berry complained that there was a “two tier” system where
PAS2025 was mandated in social housing, but “didn’t exist in the owner occupier market.” Kemp countered that it “can be offered, but you have to pay for it; if you look at an organisation like Furbnow, it’ll cost them £6000 to go through the whole process. So if you can afford it, fi ll your boots. But for a lot of people who are perhaps above that fuel poverty threshold – the squeezed middle – they’re not going to pay for that.”
Rick Clarke of NIBE supported the idea of a ‘passport,’ but asked who would pay for this in the social housing sector. Naomi Sadler said “it should be part of the assessment,” and outlined the structure of governance in the design team to oversee this. “You’ve got
retrofi t coordinators, retrofi t designers, and then you’ve got retrofi t assessors, and the designers and coordinator can technically be the same person.“ She continued: “These houses should then come with a home information pack, and if we’re talking scale, it needs to be obviously put in as a function of selling a house.” Anna Scothern of NHIC commented that this could be another challenge for SMEs: “As well as overlapping accreditation requirements, the cost of compliance could be prohibitive for SMEs, and fi rst-time entrants into retrofi t frameworks have insuffi cient support, clear routes to competence, or practical guidance.”
Skills & funding SMEs lacked confi dence to employ and invest in key retrofi t skills, due to an uncertain pipeline of work currently, according to Anna Scothern. However, she said retrofi t competence “cannot be treated as a separate industry. It must integrate into mainstream RMI delivery.” In Scotland, retrofi t skill levels in local authorities were variable, said Simon Kemp of Warmworks, but that was where his fi rm comes in to plug the gap at to fulfi l the demand. Cypren Edmonds of the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance said skills development “needed to be focused on older, traditional buildings, refl ecting the reality of UK housing stock.” Current funding models for retrofi t “often distorted the market rather than strengthening it,” according to Anna Scothern of NHIC. Also, over-centralised procurement models were excluding SMEs, she said, and came with “administrative friction” that added cost. Scothern continued, on fi nance challenges: “Opaque eligibility criteria for homeowners, and audit regimes create retrospective fi nancial risk. Long-term confi dence requires funding mechanisms that reward sustained quality and relationship- based delivery.”
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