In this episode of our Raising the Roof podcast, our guests Kate Henderson and Steve Ellard, join our host and CEO, Nick Atkin, to talk all about retrofitting.
Kate Henderson is Chief Executive of the National Housing Federation – the voice of housing associations in England. She is passionate about tackling the housing crisis, inequality, and climate change, all of which feature heavily in this episode.
Kate said retrofitting is a topic close to her heart and the sector’s because we’re here to make sure that residents of social housing have good quality homes that they can afford to live in. But of course, like everything, it does come with challenges, which Kate touched upon first:
“There are challenges, but they are ones we can overcome with the right support in place. We did a survey with our members back in 2020 and the top issue in terms of barriers to retrofit was funding. We as a sector own and manage 2.7 million homes providing homes to 6 million people, so that is a big scale of retrofit, but it’s also a big opportunity.
“We have the social housing decarbonisation fund and we’ve just had wave 2 out of the door, which is almost 800 million pounds of additional funding. It’s really important and really exciting but what we need now is the commitment of the remainder of the social housing decarbonisation fund.
“It was a 3.8-billion-pound manifesto pledge and we have definitely seen the first billion of it, but if we could get the rest of that funding up to 2030, we’d then start overcoming these other challenges, such as the funding gap, safety, supply and quality.”
So, if the funding is secured, what does this mean for the future of the social housing sector? Well, our brilliant Director of Assets and Sustainability, Steve Ellard, was able to give his point of view for Yorkshire Housing:
“I would say that cost pressures are a big one. Inflation has placed a huge amount of pressure on our retrofit plans and every other housing association, for that matter. If we go back a year or so ago, the pound doesn’t stretch as far as it did then in terms of work around things such as air source heat pumps and external wall insulation. The inflation in those areas have been absolutely massive.
“There is also a relatively low number of contractors that specialise in this type of work as well, so access to labour is a huge challenge as well. And finally, this isn’t necessarily in the challenging category but from a customer perspective, we shouldn’t be naïve enough to think that every single one of our customers sees carbon reduction and reduction in carbon emissions as the number one priority. In a lot of cases our customers issues and things that are on their agenda are far more worrying to them than carbon emissions, so a lot of it is the messaging as well.”
This moves us swiftly into the next topic of conversation on this episode which was customer engagement, before moving onto impact and supply chain. It’s certainly an episode not to miss!
Thanks to our guests Kate and Steve for joining us on Raising the Roof. To hear the full conversation and catch up on previous episodes, head to Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
This is our penultimate episode of season 2, with our final episode on the horizon, which is all about customer service with another two brilliant guests! So, don’t forget to follow our channel so you don’t miss out.