A matter of mobilisation

Meeting the challenge of “greening” the nation’s existing homes will require brains and brawn on a military scale, as the Institute of Civil Engineers’ inaugural Retrofit Solutions event in Birmingham testified. By Mark Cantrell.

“We are entering a kind of war,” said John Doggart, founder and chair of the Sustainable energy Academy (SeA), as he embarked upon his ‘mission briefing’ to those tasked with greening up the nation’s homes.

The dramatic soundbite is certainly one to make anaudience to sit up and take notice, but before anyone can say ‘steady on, old boy’, it’s worth bearing in mind the scale of the task ahead.

According to Brian Berry, director of external affairs at the Federation of Master Builders (FMB), who also addressed the assembled representatives, the scale of the task is unprecedented. There are 26 million homes that need to be retrofitted along with two million non-domestic buildings.

To put these numbers intoeven scarier terms: to achieve the target, 600,000 homes must be retrofitted every year for the next 39 years. That equates to 2,500 retrofits every working day; 333 completions ever working hour; and 5.5 completions every minute.

The estimated cost is put at an average of £25,000 per retrofit.

Totted up, that’s a lot of cash. in terms of manpower, the FMB estimates that the existing workforce in place for retrofit is in the region of 300,000 people – and that is nowhere near enough. in terms of completing 26 million homes in the given period, the organisation said the task requires a workforce of between 500,000 and 900,000 people all focused on the mass retrofit programme alone.

That’s certainly a scale that befits Doggart’s war mobilisation metaphor; the question is canBritain pull it off? That’s precisely the question that the institute of Civil engineers (iCe) was seeking to examine at its first retrofit Solutions gathering in
Birmingham.

The numbers attending sound small - 140 - but it was a somewhat select audience nonetheless; technical experts, managers, senior decision makers and so on, all of them the people either in need of the knowledge to inform the decisions they are empowered to make or in possession of the required knowledge. Well, here was the stage for them to share what they know – and not just by listening to the array of speakers but by taking part in the questions and answers, as well as conducting a little brainstorming amongst themselves at several roundtable discussions.

A single two-day event can’t answer all of the questions that must be addressed any more than even a slice of the itinerary can be compressed into a couple of magazine pages, but it was intended to make a good start at addressing the issues the country faces. And like it or not, the housing and construction sectors are at the frontline.

‘Greening’ our way of life isn’t just a quick-fire conundrum, but perhaps the single largest engineering challenge the country faces – as the programme of speakers set out to demonstrate. To win it, the sector has to settle in for a long campaign but even so the clock is ticking.

As conference producer Paul Grace said in his foreword to the event: “Current estimates are that 80 per cent of the housing stock that will be required in 2050 is already built. even with the Government’s legislation that all new homes from 2016 should be carbon neutral, the importance of retrofitting these existing buildings is undeniable if we are to reach the target of an 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.

“Having identified an issue in this area, from october 2010 i began speaking to several owners and managers of large housing stocks and people who have carried out large retrofit projects. From those discussions, it became clear that the development of materials and technologies is well underway, but the challenge lies in their implementation on the scale required.”

After the introduction by GreenSpec’s Brian Murphy, who set the scene for the forthcoming two days of information sharing and discussion, Doggart took the audience through some of the main ‘theatres’ of the operation: engaging with consumers; developing the capacity to deliver retrofit on a mass scale; furthering and sharing knowledge; and - the ultimate issue in many ways – funding such a monumental operation.

Doggart, and others, reminded that new build - though important – can only make a minor contribution to meeting the domestic sector’s contribution to carbon cuts – some four per cent – whereas retrofit can cut carbon by a massive 60 per cent. To the difficulties faced, however, has to be added the fragmentary nature of housing: owner occupied properties account for 70 per cent of total stock and private rented accounts for 11 per cent.

While social housing has an inherent scope for a structured mass programme, it remains very much the minority tenure – begging the question how can scale be applied tothe multitudes of privately owned properties? Well, part of the solution resides within the SeA’s demonstration ‘superhomes’, which apparently have played an important role in encouraging homeowners to make green improvements.

Over the two days, the talks were many and varied. Thetechnology was examined and considered, with a talk from ian Meikle of the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), among others. Funding was a major topic, with sessions on the Green investment Bank, the Green Deal, as well as the potential for green retrofit in terms of boosting economic recovery and growth. Practical discussions looked at the logistics of building supply chains, of planning retrofit programmes – including some of the pitfalls learned along the way.

The best laid plans always need to take into account the unforeseen – which by its nature can’t be pencilled in ahead of time as one speaker testified with two telling anecdotes. The first was the length of time required for tenants to be out of their homes while retrofit work was carried out; this exceeded the estimates – conveying profound implications for any mass programme that would run into thousands of homes.

The second anecdote was the disconcerting discovery that building designs did not prepare them for the physical reality they encountered - there were discrepancies between design and build that needed to be accommodated as the work progressed. Well, nobody at the conference said retrofit was every going to be easy.

Other sessions looked at training the workforce, building capacity, accreditation and standards – both needed to build trust in the technology – and the installation process, and also discussion of the “voids” in the sector’s knowledge that need to be
addressed.

Interspersed among the technical presentations a series of case studies sought to shed more light on the actual practical applications; all with the invitation to consider the lessons learned for their application at a larger scale.

The TSB’s Meikle presented two of its retrofit for the Future case studies – Clyde road and Shaftesbury Park – that demonstrated whole-house retrofits and the challenges presented by different building technologies. Manchester City Council’s Michael o’Doherty explained the city’s approach to retrofit. Staying within that city, Northwards housing’s elliot Simm and David heys told the audience about the ALMo’s whole-house retrofit project covering 12,500 of its homes.

The result, they said, was a saving of 7,500 tonnes of Co2 a year at no cost to the tenants.

Following a different tack, Don Leiper of e.oN UK tasked the audience to consider how to go about getting the community to accept the need for retrofit. he talked about strategies for marketing to a specific community, examined what key benefits housing managers should promote to tenants and provided some thoughts for targeting the techniques of community
engagement.

Meanwhile, Bob Brown, assistant director of assetmanagement and maintenance at Birmingham City Council,provided a timely reminder thatthere is a model on the table for mass retrofit mobilisation:the machinery established to further the Decent homes refurbishment programme.

Again, it may not be the entire solution, but it certainly created the templates and frameworks for large-scale procurement, supply chain assembly, resident engagement models and so forth that any mass retrofit programme would need to put in place.

Decent homes clearly holds more than a few clues, but the programme did enjoy a considerable – and quite probably unprecedented – degree of Government-largesse. in many respects, it’s the colour of the money that is at the heart of retrofit. For all the technical and logistical challenges of implementing the installation programme at the scale required, hard cash is the cold reality that cannot be side-stepped. indeed, finance will be an important theme at iCe’s retrofit Solutions event next year.

Following the event, Grace added: “one of the targets for this [event] was to address how to do this on a large scale. That was really the main aim of the conference. What came through speaking to people in advance and putting the programme together was that people were saying ‘we know how to retrofit a house; we just don’t know how to retrofit 1,000 houses’.”

At least not yet, but according to the feedback he has received, Grace believes the event has made an important contribution to the search for answers.

To a non-technical observer, the flurry of facts, figures and technical information presented at the conference was enough to make the head spin, but it clearly demonstrated that much is already known about the problem of retrofitting the nation’s homes. if there is any issue, it is one of compartmentalisation, but retrofit Solutions showed the beginnings of a crossfertilisation between these compartments.

Beyond that, it’s matter of scaling up the mobilisation of the nation’s resources. Don’t you know there’s a war on?