The problem and the opportunity

Our region is in urgent need of Better Homes that are fit for the future. ‘Better’ means improving neighbourhoods, and ensuring homes are comfortable, affordable to heat, healthy, safe and climate resilient while aligned with the net zero commitments¹.

The Mayor has a unique opportunity to tackle the climate emergency, reduce fuel poverty and improve the quality of homes for the people of West Yorkshire. As we outline below, the Mayor can deliver this by committing to a massive increase in whole-house retrofitting across the region.

A personal commitment by the Mayor to mobilise the region to support West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s (WYCA) ‘Better Homes Yorkshire’ strategy² can play a central role in a green and inclusive recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. This strategy can assist in delivering home upgrades for 950,000 households in West Yorkshire while addressing fuel poverty, tackling the climate emergency, creating significant wider social value³, and unlocking 42,000 skilled jobs2 and £29bn-£46bn of investment⁴.

At the moment, many of the existing houses are so far below a decent standard that around 100,000⁵ households in West Yorkshire experience fuel poverty: people in our region are having to choose between heating their home or putting food on the table.

Damp and cold homes exacerbate a range of physical and mental health issues⁶ including respiratory problems, strokes, heart-attacks, anxiety and depression, and it is estimated this costs the NHS in West Yorkshire around £5.8m each year⁷.

These same badly insulated and expensive to heat houses contribute 3.4 million⁸ tonnes CO2 to the climate emergency every year, 31% of the region’s emissions⁹.

The Mayor has a unique opportunity to tackle all these issues at once through delivering a massive increase in housing retrofit in West Yorkshire.

Retrofit is a term used for ‘energy efficient refurbishment’ and may include fabric efficiency measures such as insulation as well as heat, power, cooling, ventilation and water, all of which can improve thermal comfort, while supporting climate resilience, for example reducing the risk of flood damage and overheating or extreme cold in homes. Ideally this is done by considering the whole property and future climate risks with a holistic approach9.

The existing challenges to retrofit at scale are complex and multi-layered. They are fortunately also well defined and understood¹⁰ and gaining momentum in government policy and funding.

A recent Construction Leadership Council proposal for a National Retrofit Programme¹¹ presents exactly the joined-up effort required to mobilise supply and demand in the market. It has been endorsed by a broad range of key regional stakeholders including Leeds City Council and Bradford City Council.

The WYCA ‘Better Homes Yorkshire’ strategy aligns with the National Retrofit Strategy and demonstrates the level of regional ambition and leadership that is possible. It has been recently endorsed by the West Yorkshire Housing Partnership who themselves present the opportunity to tackle both fuel poverty and the climate emergency.¹²

The WYCA strategy demonstrates how policy, technical, demand, supply chain and financial stimulus need to work together to scale up the market at the rate necessary. Great stuff happening in West Yorkshire. We already have a network of capable teams in the region who can be mobilised to deliver retrofit, at scale, with backing from the Mayor.

This network includes:

• The Kirklees Warm Zone scheme, which fitted insulation in 51,000 homes (2007-2010) and is one of the largest retrofit schemes in the UK to date¹³.

• Strong leadership on climate and an inclusive recovery across the region’s local authorities including Leeds City Council and Bradford City Council’s development of neighbourhood based approaches for retrofit.

• The authors of WYCA’s Better Homes Strategy with its focus on developing a network.

• Otley Energy who are working with WYCA as part of a regional and national open-source network of key industry organisations and launching a community funded ‘one-stop-shop’ business model.

• Social housing providers such as the West Yorkshire Housing Partnership making climate commitments.

• Empty home renovators including Canopy and Latch¹⁴.

• Industry leading builders, including Sure Insulation who were involved in writing the Haynes retrofit manual¹⁵.

• Leeds College of Building which is the UK’s only college dedicated to construction.

• University of Leeds, who have carried out extensive research on retrofit, including on the supply chain network¹⁶, co-creation of solutions¹⁷ and sustainable behaviour change research¹⁸.

• Leeds Beckett University who have pioneered building performance evaluation methods over the last two decades¹⁹.

This network is a ‘Community of Interest’ ready to go, it just needs the commitment, convening and coordinating powers that the Mayor can bring.

What the Mayor can do

The following recommendations focus on how the Mayor can play a pivotal role in bringing together all the elements needed for a transformational retrofitting programme in West Yorkshire.

1. Make a Better Homes programme a key commitment to demonstrate the importance and positive potential of the agenda.
2. Create and host a Mayor’s Better Homes forum to mobilise and galvanise all stakeholders to support the programme.
3. Rigorously apply the principles of community wealth building²⁰ and just transition²¹ to the Better Homes programme.
4. Establish a regional hub to coordinate the programme and the necessary knowledge sharing, collaboration and regional capacity building.
5. Bring together social housing organisations to prioritise fuel poverty and provide a launch pad of sufficient scale to stimulate the market.
6. Engage with the West Yorkshire business community to send a signal of long term commitment to the sector and encourage the co-design of the support they need to benefit from the programme.

David Barns
David is a postgraduate researcher in low carbon energy systems at the Priestley International Centre for Climate, University of Leeds. He has a background in local government, delivering energy efficiency and renewable energy projects for social housing. David is a founding member of Our Future Leeds, a citizen-led response to climate emergency which is working for a zero-carbon, nature friendly, socially just Leeds by the 2030s.

Andy Boyle
A former partner in an accountancy and business advisory practice I’m working on how we build the knowledge, skills, behaviours, business and finance models across all sections of society to accelerate the transformation to a sustainable, low carbon and inclusive economy.

Jamie Keats
Jamie is an architectural designer at Citu, the sustainable urban property developer based in Leeds.

Neil Mckenna
Neil is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds. He works with community-led housing groups in Leeds and West Yorkshire, undertaking action research to support better place-making, democracy and social justice in housing. Neil is also an urban Planner with Tibbalds Planning & Urban Design and a chartered member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).

David Nugent
David leads Canopy Housing, a UN Habitat award-winning self-help housing organisation based in Leeds. He also serves on the Boards of Leeds Community Homes and GIPSIL Homes. He originally trained as an architect and has worked in housing for more than twenty years. He recently completed an MSc in Sustainability and Adaptation and is committed to the promotion and use of sustainable, natural materials.

Kate Simpson
Kate is currently exploring data use in building retrofit decision-making, as a visiting researcher to The Alan Turing Institute under their Data Centric Engineering Programme, through the Data-Driven Design under Uncertainty Grand Challenge. This builds on 10 years of building energy and retrofit research, most recently identifying the skills and knowledge required to achieve sustainable construction at the University of Leeds.

Andy Walker
Andy Walker is an engineer and project manager by training. In 2010 he founded the social enterprise SURE Insulation to meet the growing demand for high specification insulation work, and was then invited to be the Technical Editor and a Co-Author of the best selling ‘Haynes Manual on Home Insulation’. Andy is a Fellow of the Leeds Sustainability Institute and has given guest lectures and spoken at conferences including a Keynote Speech at the International Sustainable Ecological Engineering Design for Society Conference.

Andy Wilson
I experiment with structures to facilitate collaboration and have been one of the co-founders and main organisers of para-lab (2017-) and Superposition (2013-2017), both collectives of artists and scientists; The Making Space, a cooperatively run shared workspace (2013-); Same Skies (2015-); and two co-operatives to develop software.

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