Achieving large-scale housing retrofits in UK cities – a model to emulate

Manchester
City Council’s goal is to be a zero-carbon city by 2038. One step in achieving
that is the renovation of their substantial social housing stock. It’s a
significant challenge so they have devoted three
days in late February to host various stakeholders with the help of Low Carbon Homes to share expertise,
best practices and determine the resources need to get the job done.

The online
conference is one of a series of events organised with different UK cities
including Brighton, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and more. Energy Cities will
be presenting at the event on best practices gleaned, with the help of our
friends at Social Housing Europe, from
other countries that can be applied in the UK.

“As
a Host Partner, each city or region we collaborate with becomes the enabler of
the conference. We then form an Advisory Group of other local stakeholders,
which can include housing associations, universities, chambers of commerce,
trade bodies and community groups.  With this Group we agree the desired
outputs from the conference, and then curate a programme to meet those
objectives.  The conference provides the Host Partner with an opportunity
to showcase existing work, demonstrate ambition and show leadership of the
topic of retrofit, and bring stakeholders together in the independent
environment created by Low Carbon Homes,” said Graham Lock, Founder of Low
Carbon Homes.

For
the upcoming Manchester event the Advisory Group decided that the challenge of
retrofitting all of the social housing stock meant that it warranted an event
focused solely on the issue.

“We
target the same audience profile for each event: engineers, architects,
contractors, consultants, landlords and policy makers – all from the local
area, and we tend to attract between 100-200 attendees to each event.  We
carefully monitor satisfaction levels after the event to ensure we understand
attendee objectives in attending, and how those have been met.  I’m proud
to say that these levels tend to be very high – 97% of attendees at our recent
Liverpool event would recommend Low Carbon Homes to colleagues, for example,”
continued Lock.

The
model of cities bringing various stakeholders to a table to plot a course
forward isn’t unique, of course. Most Energy Cities’ members recognise the
value of building a strong, local alliance to tackle issues of broad concern.

“Our
main lessons so far with Low Carbon Homes, is that collaboration is a vital
element of scaling up retrofit and that technical solutions exist for most
scenarios.  We’re very keen to stop the ‘reinventing of the wheel’ by
sharing best-practice and facilitating conversations between all involved on
this complex, but critically important topic,” said Lock.

Those
conversations can deliver benefits after the three day event and can extend far
beyond the local region.

“The
Group formed for our Derbyshire event consisted of several local councils and
the local university.  They still meet, and have developed an expanded
working group to not only tackle retrofit but wider climate change issues across
the region.  For our Glasgow event we had a number of sessions exploring
the challenge of multi-tenure apartment blocks and were able to draw on the
CoachCopro Project in Paris,” he concluded.

The post Achieving large-scale housing retrofits in UK cities – a model to emulate appeared first on Energy Cities.

Fuente: ENERGY CITIES
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