To successfully upgrade millions of homes under the UK's Warm Homes Plan, we need to change our approach to retrofit advice.
A one-size-fits-all model - providing a simple list of measures and costs - simply doesn’t work. Every home is unique.
The answer, policy-makers agree, is tailored advice. But what does that mean?
The three pillars of tailored advice
Just as every home is unique, so are the needs and characteristics of the owners and residents seeking advice. We cannot tailor advice without understanding these, and it is not as simple as categorisation by ownership and archetype.
To provide truly effective advice, we need to consider three key factors: agency, urgency, and retrofit literacy.
- Agency refers to a person’s ability to act and make choices. For example, is the person seeking advice the homeowner, a tenant, or a landlord? Are they limited by planning or leasehold restrictions? Are they able to make decisions or do they need additional support due to learning difficulties, and does the process make it easy to act? Advice that doesn't account for these factors will only lead to frustration due to irrelevance or cliff-edges.
- Urgency measures the time sensitivity and importance of the advice. Is the advice needed for a project that's ready to go, or is it for planning a future renovation? And is the customer driven by a desire to get a household out of fuel poverty, cut bills, improve air quality, cut carbon or meet new energy efficiency standards.
- Retrofit literacy is a person's ability to understand and make informed decisions about home energy improvements. This includes knowledge of building performance, retrofit standards, potential risks, and available funding.
Tailoring advice and designing its accessibility based on these factors makes it more relevant and valuable to the customer, but can also reduce costs by focussing minds on what is really required for that customer at that point in time.
Retrofit advice requires high quality data
High-quality data is essential for effective retrofit advice, and its quality is determined by two main characteristics: source and resolution.
- Real vs. Synthetic Data: Real data is collected from a real event, while synthetic data is generated by algorithms. Synthetic data can fill gaps, but it must be continuously updated with high-quality real data to stay relevant.
- High vs. Low Resolution: High-resolution data provides more detail, leading to more accurate cost estimates and a wider range of retrofit options. While open EPC data is valuable, it is low-resolution and only available for about 60% of homes.
High-resolution, real data empowers homeowners with detailed plans and confident procurement, while low-resolution, synthetic data can only provide a vague, unreliable indication.
High resolution, synthetic data can support planning at scale or in early, engagement phases but low resolution, synthetic data is too vague and can be misleading or off-putting.
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Advice should support homeowners through their retrofit journey
A stable, seamless customer journey requires an integrated data journey that supports advice at every step.
The advice content, depth and channel may differ to be relevant to the customer owner at different stages of the journey. But the integration builds knowledge of the building over time, avoids revisits and conflicting advice, and enables quality assurance, project collaboration and progress reporting.
We've identified five stages in this journey - including engagement as a vital first step that is often forgotten by policy-makers.
This journey is available now with Ecofurb. The data journey encompasses the customer journey and project management, supported by a CRM linked to retrofit workflow service PAS Hub; the Whole House Plan generating software, Surveyor Pro; and a feedback loop to the Pathways housing stock model.
But there is room for improvement, with the following options available to Government as part of EPC reform and its review of consumer protection.
- Access existing data: A lot of valuable data from new builds and past government schemes like CERT, CESP, and ECO, as well as solar panel installations and warranty schemes, is not currently on the EPC register. Local authorities and landlords are wasting time and money trying to collect data that has already been gathered through channels such as building control and grant-funded programmes.
- Lodge completed works: The EPC register is out of date and any EPC done now will remain valid for ten years. On completion, accredited retrofit works could be lodged directly on the EPC Register to improve the accuracy of the register, for policy-makers and the property market.
- Permit sharing for auditing and efficiency: Accreditation Schemes should be able to access data from the Central Register to support advice provision and to compare a property's data with previous versions, regardless of which Scheme accredited the original assessment. This would be a quick and efficient way to improve the data available to property-owners, and a step forward for EPC smart auditing rules.
Right advice at the right time
In the sector there has been significant investment in determining who delivers advice under PAS2035, and what that incorporates, the skills required and funding for local energy advice. As such the mechanics of advice provision are broadly understood but in-person advice, while engaging, is expensive. It is time to ask what advice should be provided when, before determining who delivers the advice, and how.
Our longstanding mantra has been that every home needs a plan.
Does that mean every home needs a survey now? No, but it does mean that every homeowner should have a broad idea of what the future could hold and a route to getting more detailed advice.
Our experience over the past 20 years of advice provision has identified a journey of different advice services, at different price points.
Independent whole-house plans, combining condition surveys with tailored advice, are invaluable when installing multiple measures, managing air quality alongside energy performance and supporting quality assurance of installation. However, with costs ranging from £350 to £1000, they may not be ideal for initial engagement.
Where home-specific advice is required for initial engagement it needs to be available remotely, be low cost and hold no surprises if the customer proceeds to a survey or quote. Open EPC does not deliver on this due to its likeilhood of being out of date and providing a limited set of recommendations that cannot be tailored to the customer's interests - a key element of engagement.
Our recommendation for the advice element of engagement is a step above open EPC data. Services like Ecofurb verify and add to open EPC data with a range of open, Ordnance Survey and in-house data, and proprietary algorithms and - importantly - allow property-owners to update their home's data with changes they have made and test out options suited to their home and goals.
Encouragingly, we've found that these recommendations powered by high-resolution synthetic data, enhanced with real data where available, offer sufficient accuracy for initial scoping and planning – in relation to both measures and costs.
And for the exceptional properties where the complexity of the home makes this online advice challenging? Owners understand. They know their own homes and recognise the likelihood of the need for an indepth survey.
Checklist for online retrofit advice
Online analysis can identify the most appropriate measures and their potential cost for a fraction of the cost, and provide insight into how the measures work and their impact on the home.
But not all online calculators are the same, with differentiation that policy-makers need to consider:
- Resolution: Is the data high-resolution? If not the advice will miss opportunities and have less accurate recommendations.
- Real vs synthetic: How real is the property data? How is synthetic data trained, on a continual basis? Is it clear to users how real and reliable data is and can users update the data with their ‘real’ data to improve the accuracy of advice?
- People: Can the advice incorporate owner preferences, such as budget, measures and their aims – whether those are EPC-based, fuel bill reduction and/or reducing carbon emissions?
- Agency: is the advice relevant to the situation of those seeking advice, and empower them to take the next step?
- Urgency: does the advice speak to their driver, and offer a call to action that provides a supportive nudge forward through the retrofit journey, if the customer is ready to act?
There is of course a risk that a later in-depth survey will result in different advice. Customers generally accept this where the reason is evidenced, for example the survey identifies structural challenges or planning considerations make an alternative approach more cost-effective.
Advice for policy-makers
Our experience over the past two decades has tested and delivered an approach to advice that reflects the different needs of different home-owners. From individuals to landlords. From flats to large homes and HMOs. And online and in-person. And every other version of the venn diagram of retrofit advice, encompassing each customers' agency, urgency and retrofit literacy.
With this in mind, our recommendations for policy-makers designing retrofit advice services is that it should and, in our experience, can:
- reflect the customers' urgency, agency and retrofit literacy
- apply high quality data in terms of resolution and, where cost-effective, real data
- support the customer through the retrofit journey
- deliver value for money by balancing cost, accuracy and deliverability
