The review found that the emerging home retrofit market needed to decarbonise eight homes every minute for the next 29 years in order for the UK to achieve its ambition of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. This required “substantial growth and change within the supply chain to meet the challenge of quality, scale and complexity within a relatively short time frame”.
In the short term, there was skills gaps that needed prioritising to build a sustainable market and help address existing latent demand, including roles in:
- Property assessment
- Advice and customer care
- Low carbon heating installation
- Technology integration
In the medium term, the research identified three key challenges that the sector must address to develop the market, stimulate demand, and increase capacity and skills provision, across the supply chain:
- Consumer Confidence and Trust
- Quality and Governance
- Integration
Geraldine Newton-Cross, Commercial Director at Energy Systems Catapult, said: “Decarbonising our homes is an urgent challenge. If consumers are to welcome changes to their heating systems at the pace required to meet our carbon budget, they need professionals who can hold their hand as they retrofit their homes, not just provide piecemeal recommendations about favoured technologies.”
“Consumers need support to understand the cost and performance trade-offs of different approaches. This requires a new approach to be adopted across the energy services sector – requiring new jobs and new skills, including in digital technologies and data – to implement decarbonisation measures at the pace and scale demanded.”
As part of an Energy Systems Catapult project exploring net zero skills and training, the Gatsby Foundation funded research to map existing skills provision, highlight gaps and identify skills requirements for the future home retrofit marketplace.
In addition to highlighting several skills gaps in the home retrofit sector, the research also identified the need for wider activities to address structural issues:
- Improving quality assurance and monitoring of installs to drive improvements in installation and training, as well as increasing customer confidence in the supply chain
- Focusing on customer care and experience, in particular provision of good-quality advice and information to customers to enable them to make decisions confidently
- Making better use of data to provide more detailed and meaningful property assessments, and to highlight performance gaps after installation has taken place
- Identifying ways of integrating a fragmented supply chain better, increasing knowledge sharing and collaboration to help promote good practice and develop offers that customers will find attractive.
Daniel Sandford Smith, Director of Programmes at Gatsby Charitable Foundation, said: “There is no doubt that we need to do more to improve the energy efficiency of our existing housing stock. We welcome this report from Energy Systems Catapult which is the first step in the journey to identifying the skills that will be needed to create a retrofit revolution.”
