Charlotte Delaney spoke to Becky Lane, CEO and Co-founder of Furbnow, about why the customer proposition is the crucial part of retrofit delivery.
Could you tell us how you came to set up Furbnow?
I’ve been in energy and retrofit for much of my career to date, so I’ve got a 360 view of what’s going on in the energy efficiency space. The conclusion I’m always coming to is that it’s the customer proposition and the service element – rather than the technology – that means people will want low carbon. I became obsessed with the hypothesis, that local authorities will be delivering net zero and they’ve got the resources to do that.
I moved to West Midlands Combined Authority in the Energy Capital team to set-up the Net Zero Neighbourhood programme after working as a Commercial Consultant at Energy Systems Catapult. The Net Zero Neighbourhood programme is an intersection of new business models and new services, trying to figure out how the finance would stack up to support retrofit across all housing tenures – the idea being that street-by-street is possibly the most efficient way to do it. So, I’ve gone from commercial perspective to policy all the way to retrofit delivery on the ground.
My hypothesis still holds, homeowners want to retrofit their homes – insulation, ventilation, solar PV, battery, heat pumps – but there’s a lot of negativity and fear in the press. That’s where Furbnow came into being as a practical solution. We connect homeowners with retrofit coordinators who can give people impartial expert advice and then we provide the service layer, integrating the customer and the suppliers and finance partners, making sure that there is a high-quality standard of service and then we also take them forward with the project delivery.
What would you like to see the government do to improve the rollout of home retrofit in the UK?
When it comes down to the fundamentals there needs to be a clear path to EPC improvement. It took them three years to figure out, and announce, what the EPC requirements were going to be for private landlords and for social housing – again, we’re waiting to have an update on EPC requirements. For privately owned, there are no requirements in terms of energy efficiency. The only way we will get mass-scale investment into retrofit and improvements in homes is when there is a link between property value and EPCs. There needs to be some long-term policy certainty, and that comes from a roadmap of EPC improvement for each housing tenure.
What are the biggest challenges to energy-efficient retrofit at scale?
The supply chain. I think that’s the key. There is a problem with the quality of software tools that are available to the supply chain to do retrofit assessments and management. Again, that’s an area we’re looking to solve. That’s a near term problem, but in the long run the challenges really will be about having the capacity to supply whatever is required at any given time. The training up of hundreds of 10,000s of retrofit coordinators and installers for various different energy efficiency measures.
What do you think can be done to encourage more people to train either as retrofit assessors or installers of energy-saving technologies?
The Retrofit Academy is doing a tremendous amount of work and engaging with colleges to help with the training and to get more colleges on board. You can train to be a retrofit coordinator either for free or partly subsidised, but how many people know about that? Again, it partly comes down to demand and advertising by the government that retrofit is the way forward. There should be something in the order of what happened with the smart meter campaign for this. Training will happen at a significant scale when the demand and opportunity is clear to people looking to start their career or retrain. A retrofit coordinator is a very skilled professional and the wages are high.
What about the behavioural change of the households themselves – what can be done here?
There is a role for helping people understand how to best use energy in their homes. How to do that? I will admit, I don’t know because it’s a bit of a mix of what do we expect people to do within their homes, if they’ve already done the investment then it’s their responsibility and their choice in terms of what they do with the energy after that investment.
When you invest in energy efficiency measures in peoples’ homes, often energy bills don’t go down because people are able to heat their home to preferred temperature and keep it there. They’re actually heating the home more than they were before. So I think that the key to this is making people aware and over time they can adjust their habits. People can figure things out for themselves but they don’t always know the facts and it’s difficult for them to apply what they’ve learned to their own lives. There needs to be that bridge between advice and application, which we’re aiming to solve with Furbnow.
We’re trying to help homeowners invest as much as they can in energy efficiency, so they think ‘I want to invest £1,000 in my home. I’ll choose insulation instead of doing the bathroom’. It’s all about making that as accessible and attractive as possible.
Becky Lane is speaking in the elemental Housing Hub at InstallerSHOW 2023 on the future of housing retrofit, which runs 27th to 29th June at the NEC. See the agenda here: installershow.com/event-timetable
