Retrofit – being more efficient about energy efficiency

The UK has some of the oldest and most inefficient housing stock in the world. This is costly for those of us who live in them, but also for the planet, whose limited resources are used up trying to heat them. Centre for Thriving Places has been working with a range of partners across the South Yorkshire region to help find solutions to this problem that can warm up more than just a few toes.

At the heart of our work is agreement that a co-benefits approach to policymaking is a game-changer. This way of working looks at understanding our shared destination – how we create the conditions for everyone to thrive on a thriving planet, and then understanding how collective action can drive multiple benefits that deliver that outcome.

Retrofit  is a great example of an urgent area of work that is capable of delivering multiple co-benefits for people, the communities they live in, the economy they are part of and the environment on which we all depend.

Retrofit, at its most simple, is about improving the energy efficiency of an existing building. This can include insulation, dealing with airflow, or replacing fossil fuels as a way of heating homes. This is a huge issue in the UK and is costly for us as well as significantly contributing to our carbon emissions.

CTP is starting to do more work in this area. As part of our work in the Reclaiming Our Regional Economies programme (RORE) we’re about to kick off a new Partnership Learning and Insights Group with South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA). From June 2025, we’ll be convening people across the South Yorkshire region and beyond who work in delivery, policy and research to explore key themes.

‘The seemingly simple path of retrofitting local houses to make them warmer becomes a revolutionary step that could benefit a whole region’ .

If done collaboratively, across traditional silos and sectors, and with a focus on accruing benefits in the right places for those who need it most, a major retrofit programme can help with multiple entrenched local problems. It can:

• Counteract fuel poverty by dramatically reducing the cost of heating a home
• Tackle numerous health problems and health inequalities associated with poor housing conditions, damp and mould
• Provide training and good jobs for local people
• Boost local business in a growing green business sector thus increasing local wealth then spent in the local economy and local taxes for public services
• Reduce carbon emissions for the long term
• Provide greater energy self-sufficiency in the face of global price rises, wars and tariffs
• Surface and seek to mitigate any negative impacts that may occur during and after (such as disruption during works, or rent increases).

When viewed through all these different lenses, the seemingly simple path of retrofitting local houses to make them warmer becomes a revolutionary step that could benefit a whole region. When we are able to bring together people with different perspectives, access to resources and networks across health, training, employment, housing and climate – the imagination, possibilities and scale begin to grow. When we explore how to bring in local people to shape programmes to local needs, we change our approach to decision-making, shifting to delivering multiple local benefits to those who need them the most. This will have far reaching effects.

So we are excited to be working with the people of South Yorkshire and beyond to use Retrofit as a gateway to a Thriving Places and co-benefits way of working. By centring the wellbeing outcomes of people and place and focusing on collective action to drive them, we will explore retrofit as part of a wider learning and skills ecosystem, how and why it can contribute to health outcomes, how we can use community engagement to inform policy and delivery and finally, how we can build a shared narrative for why we need this collective approach. 

All these topics have been chosen by local professionals who attended an initial session to test appetite for this work. We’re going to start here and broaden out – we know there will be a lot more to come!

Liz Zeidler, CEO

• If you’d like to find out more about this topic we will be at the Sheffield Festival of Debate on 22nd May with SY Ecofit, a social enterprise delivering retrofit with a community wealth building focus. Chief Executive Liz Zeidler will lead a participatory exploration of the principles of co-benefits and how and why retrofit is a great example of how we can win for people, place and planet by working together. We’re delighted to be participating amongst other folks who are thinking deeply and acting collectively to bring about social change. The full programme is here. 

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash