Retrofit action planning in Oxfordshire

Overview

The 2022 draft of the Pathways to a Zero Carbon Oxfordshire (PaZCO) Report (prepared by City Energy, on behalf of Oxfordshire County Council, and due to be published during 2023), identified that developing an action plan to address the current retrofit skills training gap would be key to achieving the domestic emissions targets set by each of the District Councils within the Oxfordshire.

The Report highlighted that by 2030 over 16,000 properties will need to be retrofitted to above an EPC ‘B’ standard to sufficiently mitigate GHG emissions from Oxfordshire’s domestic homes sector. This equates to approximately 54 properties per week from 2024 onwards.

Oxfordshire County Council has been charged with leading on this action and engaging with local stakeholders to better understand the existing retrofit landscape, identify the skills gap and current barriers, and pinpoint opportunities for collaboration to address those issues.

Action taken

On 10 January 2023, Oxfordshire County Council in partnership with the Low Carbon Hub, brought together a range of stakeholders including the District Councils, organisations with a strategic role in transforming domestic retrofit provision in Oxfordshire and other invited experts, for a retrofit roundtable event.

Intended impact

The aim of the roundtable was to:

• Gain a shared understanding of the current policy context and the scale of the challenge like where we are now and where do we want to be
• Understand each organisation’s strategic role and objectives, and put faces to names for the key members of the teams working on the domestic retrofit agenda
• Understand what services / projects are currently being delivered or planned
• Explore and capture the problems we need to solve
• Gain greater clarity on how we move to accelerated delivery of domestic retrofit in order to meet identified targets by 2030.

Outcome

The roundtable attendees provided each other with an overview all the programmes and schemes going on currently in Oxfordshire’s retrofit landscape, which was an educational and valuable exercise. It also provided the opportunity for stakeholders to network, build stronger relationships, increase understanding, connect over their desire to work together in future and to provide a strategic solution to the issue of accelerating domestic retrofitting across the county.

Cosy Homes Oxfordshire’s ‘able to pay’ concessionary retrofit model was discussed and analysed in detail as a potential delivery solution that could be scaled up for the wider ‘partially able’ and ‘unable to pay’ markets. Key drivers for domestic energy efficiency retrofit were identified as:

• carbon emissions reductions / climate change mitigation and adaptation
• public health improvement

There was a brainstorming session to identify the issues. Current barriers identified include:

• Planning permission issues blocking retrofitting in conservation areas.
• Lack of tutors to deliver the green skills training courses that colleges would like to run.
• Insufficient installers and suppliers to provide services to the current market, which is exacerbated as the market scales up, leading to knock-on issues around pricing and timescales.
• Insufficient people with the ‘right’ installation skills to run / work for those businesses as demand increases (estimate 10,000 additional people needed to work for companies, some of which don’t exist right now).

 Suggestions for what is (ideally) needed to overcome these issues:

• Bring Retrofit Coordinators together to define what their challenges to scaling are.
• Set up an Oxfordshire-wide list of Local Authority endorsed suppliers who meet a defined quality standard for retrofit project delivery and are engaged with helping to achieve net zero targets.
• Supply chain that is incentivised or enforced to implement projects to the defined quality standards and follow a ‘whole house’ approach as opposed to current silo working. For instance moving to a scenario where a heat pump installer ensures that the correct level of insulation has been undertaken in a property prior to installing a heat pump.
• Start-up funding / working capital for the supply chain businesses, plus training of business ‘managers’ not just retrofit skills.
• Building Control Officers to be trained as Retrofit Coordinators, so that they can advise / check that projects incorporate the correct retrofit standards whilst they are signing off building work.
• Clear strategy that makes the distinction between tackling fuel poverty and reducing carbon emissions, as these potentially tap into two different retrofit markets.
• Funding solutions for able to pay / partially able to pay from private sector / banks.
• Start with clear council strategy and then ask what the operational model requires, providing a better opportunity to look for partners that fulfil the strategy’s needs.

Way forward

The appetite to find a strategic way forward resulting from the roundtable event remains strong and has resulted in several spin off meetings – discussions are ongoing. However, it was agreed that at this stage we don’t have the market intelligence needed to fully define the solution to the problem. There is an eagerly anticipated report due from the Greater South East Net Zero Hub (GSENZH) which is hoped will better inform in this area.

In addition, another roundtable event is planned in partnership with the Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership (OxLEP) for March 2023. This event will focus on the need for increased green skills training provision, looking at what can be done to attract more people to train / teach in retrofit-related skills and how money awarded to District Councils from the UK Shared Prosperity Fund can be utilised to generate growth in this area.

Contact: Gayle Pilkington Assistant Retrofit Project Manager, Oxfordshire County Council [email protected]