Improving home energy efficiency - retrofit assessment review: policy report

Recommendations for enabling HEETSA to become a Mission-driven Approach to Retrofit

We began the work on this project with a tight scope that was focussed specifically on assessment methods. However, as the work evolved, and based on significant input from stakeholders, we found considerable consensus on many of the key issues. This means that we are able to present a much more holistic set of recommendations and ways forward.

We are of the view that HEETSA now provides a rare and valuable opportunity to develop a mission-driven approach to delivering retrofit projects that could build resilience into the Scottish building stock and Scottish communities for generations to come. This approach recognises the need to decarbonise our building stock, but also that this cannot be fully realised without bringing consumers and communities on board by tackling fuel poverty, and delivering measures that will benefit occupant health that will reduce demands on health and social care services.

Following the withdrawal of the Heat in Buildings Bill, HEETSA can now be progressed in way that will underpin whatever legislation is to be tabled in the coming years and, by taking a bottom-up approach to improving our building stock, help ensure that this will be successful.

Our key recommendations and proposed ways forward are as follows:

• Taking a maintenance-first approach is fundamental to our findings and proposals. Ensuring all Scottish properties are brought up to good standards of maintenance is an essential first step for improving energy performance and thermal comfort, tackling fuel poverty, and improving occupant health. All retrofit projects should begin with on-site inspections to identify maintenance issues, using thermal imaging and (where appropriate) invasive tests to check for issues such as moisture ingress and insulation settling within cavity walls.
• We recognise that no single assessment method, currently in use or otherwise, will be sufficient to meet HEETSA’s needs as an off the peg solution. Furthermore, even using a combination of methods will mean filling gaps where existing methods are insufficient in terms of detail, scope, etc. However, bringing these under a single HEETSA approach should enable these gaps to be plugged more rapidly and cost-effectively, without the prohibitive costs of developing and delivering a single HEETSA-specific assessment. By combining evidence from practical experience with the evidence from this and other reports, this would enable the development of a framework for the comparative evaluation of the most appropriate methodologies, which could be included in training. We further recommend, wherever possible, that such assessments should be based on open-source standards.
• We recognise that the design, delivery, and assessment of communal and district heating systems is a substantially more technically complex task, and does not fall entirely within HEETSA’s scope. We further recognise that, in contrast to the previous point, the tools needed for these tasks will likely include at least some that are commercial intellectual property. However, the final HEETSA approach should be one in which all key roles include some awareness and understanding of these potential solutions, in order to identify where they will likely be preferable to individual solutions.
• We have deliberately broken up the term ‘Retrofit Coordinator’ into three distinct roles – Retrofit Project Manager, Retrofit Consultant, and Retrofit Advocate. This has been done to provide greater clarity to the Scottish Government, stakeholders, delivery bodies, and consumers. The three roles are complementary but require different skillsets, and so this differentiation is also intended to correspond to those different skills and training needs, and to enable more people to understand how they can contribute to the retrofit agenda.
• The differentiation of ‘Retrofit Coordinator’ is also intended to enable the better direction of funding to different types and sources of skills and training delivery. We recognise that this is an emerging and growing market serving a diverse audience of learners - different levels of prior knowledge and experience, different learning needs, different barriers to entry, different levels of availability geographically, etc. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution to meeting all these needs and a range of learning providers - from large traditional learning providers to emerging and specialist providers - will be needed to meet them.
• Finally, the differentiation makes it clearer how community-based organisations and small, local, installers can enable and provide benefits to the design and delivery of new retrofit projects.
• We recognise that the role of a Retrofit Assessor is a distinct role, requiring a higher degree of technical knowledge and experience, and regulation. We propose that the Building Standards Division (BSD) takes on the role of being the independent verifier for retrofit assessments. Following from this, we are able to identify four key stages in the retrofit journey where some level of verification / oversight would be invaluable:
  • Assessment of building conditions and household circumstances. This falls directly within HEETSA’s scope, and would include consideration of measures in individual and community contexts in order to identify cases where community-scale projects and/or communal or district heating may lead to more optimal solutions. For community-scale projects, using archetypes may have some value at this initial level of assessment.
  • Design stage - developing retrofit plans and pathways. This would be further enabled by the introduction of Building Passports.
  • Delivery and verification.
  • Post-occupancy evaluation (POE), in order to identify and rectify any post-retrofit issues, provide any evidence needed for consumer redress, enable the resolution of any complaints, and educate occupants about how best to use any new measures such as replacement heating systems.
• The adoption of BSD as an independent verifier is intended to ensure greater and increasing alignment between standards for retrofit and new builds, and to help justify further resourcing of this important unit of government.
• We recognise that greater regulation of all aspects of the design, delivery, and assessment of retrofit projects is needed. Such regulation needs to be sensitive to the current state of the market and the impacts (time, costs, etc) of meeting new regulations, but it must also be strong enough to tackle the significantly low levels of consumer confidence relating to every stage of the retrofit journey. However, we have not been prescriptive as to where different regulations should sit within the variously devolved / reserved nature of the Scottish Government’s powers and responsibilities. As HEETSA moves forward to public consultation we recommend that the team consult with Consumer Scotland on this specific issue.

We are now at a stage where we believe that the evidence base presented here and detailed further in our Technical Report is robust, and that our findings represent a high degree of consensus. As such, we believe that our recommendations and proposals are sufficient to move HEETSA forward to public consultation stage and the introduction of a HEETSA Bill.