“If properly implemented, retrofitting can help lower energy bills, create warm and comfortable homes, contribute to a fairer, more sustainable future, create high-skilled green jobs & boost economic growth.”
By Marion Roberts, Peace and Justice Project
“Revolution, revolution” demanded a housing activist as the launch for the Retrofit Fit for the Future campaign closed on 19th March 2025. This might seem like an overstatement, but for the renters and residents living in cold draughty homes, battling with mould on their walls, forced to choose between heating and eating, their health and children’s education suffering, retrofitting would make a dramatic improvement to their lives.
Retrofit – upgrading and improving existing homes and other buildings – is a critical part of a just transition, offering a response to the climate emergency to address deep seated inequalities in housing and create thousands of green jobs. Its key features are introducing alternative energy sources such as heat pumps, solar panels and batteries, improving insulation and ventilation, but crucially these must be based on getting buildings into a good state of repair first and carrying out the work to a high standard.
Currently 13.1m homes, 52% of the country’s total housing stock, require energy upgrades to meet national standards. Medact, one of the organisers of the Retrofit for the Future campaign, advises that tackling cold homes could save the NHS £540mn a year. Research by Citizens Advice estimates that upgrading the most energy inefficient homes could stop 670,000 children from developing asthma.
Past government programmes have been piecemeal with some interventions actually leading to unintended problems. For example, injecting insulation into poorly constructed cavity walls leads to more problems with cold and damp. The UK does not have the numbers of skilled workers with sufficient training to carry out retrofit schemes effectively, because workers are mainly self-employed and employed in a fragmented into micro-firms. Vocational education and training have been held back by the lack of a work-based training infrastructure.
People living in private rented accommodation suffer the most from poor quality housing and insecure conditions. 21% of private renters live in houses that don’t even meet the decent home standard, let alone the requirements for energy efficiency. Tenants fear that if they ask for repairs and improvements, they will face rent rises. ACORN, another campaign organiser, found in their latest research that 22.8% of respondents to a survey had to relocate because of rent rises. They also face the consequences of badly installed upgrades, by an inexperienced and poorly supervised workforce.
If properly implemented, retrofitting can help lower energy bills, create warm and comfortable homes, contribute to a fairer, more sustainable future, create high-skilled green jobs and boost economic growth.
The Labour government has introduced new measures to tackle retrofit in the Warm Homes Plan, which provides a limited budget for councils to implement retrofit to the poorest homes in their areas. They are also consulting on the proposal to require all private landlords to meet new energy efficiency requirements by 2030. These measures are insufficient to meet the scale of challenge. Large scale, publicly accountable, programmes are needed.
Fuel Poverty Action, ACORN, Greener Jobs Alliance, Medact and the Peace & Justice Project have teamed up to push for key demands in the Government’s retrofit programmes. These are:
- Putting residents at the heart of retrofit – involving tenants and homeowners in the process from start to finish.
- Ensuring high-quality, accountable retrofit work – with independent assessment, strong regulation and prompt rectification and compensation when retrofit does not achieve promised results.
- Building a well-trained workforce for the future – creating secure, skilled jobs that contribute to a greener, fairer economy.
- Protecting renters – with legislation to prevent landlords from evicting tenants or raising rents as a result of retrofit improvements.
These demands were made in an open letter to MP’s before the Spring Budget Statement. More details explaining the demands and the background to them are available in a briefing document to be found on our Retrofit for the Future website.
The Spring Budget Statement missed an opportunity to mention retrofit, focusing instead on cuts that affect the poorest in society, and concentrating on construction skills for new-build housing to be provided by volume house builders.
There is a hope though, with the devolved powers that the combined authorities have been given, they could step up to the retrofit challenge as Manchester seems to be doing. As well as an ambitious schedule for retrofitting their existing housing stock, they could expand their directly employed and unionised labour force, draw on the Government’s support for the regional FE colleges to boost retrofit education and use their local powers to support private renters. Many city regions have strong tenants, residents and community organisations who should be involved throughout.
Readers of this article who live in other places are encouraged to join the campaign, write to their MP’s, and lobby their local councils. We urge readers who work in construction, housing, local authorities and further and higher education to pass motions in their union branches promoting Retrofit for a greener, fairer future.
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