In March 2021 we’re hosting a Low Carbon Homes online event for Oxfordshire, focused on the key barrier for increasing the uptake of home retrofit – the supply chain. The event will run over three mornings, and sessions will include both speaker sessions and interactive workshops to generate ideas to overcome this barrier.

We’ve been running Cosy Homes Oxfordshire as a pilot home retrofit service for almost two years. During that time, we’ve made many learnings about working in the home retrofit sector, but our biggest barrier has always been finding enough trusted and high-quality contractors to deliver home retrofit projects in Oxfordshire – be that installers, manufacturers, electricians, or anyone else in the supply chain.

From the word go, we’ve had no issue finding homeowners who are keen to retrofit their home to improve comfort and reduce carbon emissions and energy bills. The market for home retrofit is clearly there. But, the supply chain to deliver this home retrofit, is not. There’s clearly a need to build the supply chain for retrofit in the UK.

That’s been made doubly evident by the launch of the Green Homes Grant, and the issues that are now unfolding for homeowners who can’t access the scheme because there are no qualified contractors in their area to deliver the work.

There’s clearly a need to build the supply chain for retrofit in the UK

That means training opportunities to bring new people into the building sector, from apprenticeships to train up the young, to re-skilling programmes to enable those who are unemployed to find work in the retrofit sector (supporting the green recovery from Covid-19 at the same time). There’s also room for innovation and entrepreneurship, bringing new ideas to the plate.

We know we can’t solve this problem overnight, but we do want to open conversations and spark ideas around the challenge of the supply chain for retrofit. We’re doing that by hosting a Low Carbon Homes Oxfordshire event in March. And if it’s a problem that interests you too, we’d love to see you there.

The event details

Date: 9-11 March 2020
Time: 8.30-12.30 (three drop-in morning sessions)
Where? Online
Run by: Low Carbon Homes
Hosted by: Cosy Homes Oxfordshire
Registration (free): https://www.lowcarbonhomes.uk/events/oxfordshire-march-9-2021/#register
Low Carbon Homes Oxfordshire is hosted by Cosy Homes Oxfordshire, a whole house retrofit service making it simple for homeowners to reduce the carbon emissions and energy bills of their homes – whilst also making them cosier and healthier to live in. 

As we know, if we are to address the climate emergency and meet targets for reducing emissions, we cannot ignore the environmental impact of our homes. This means that enabling home retrofit must be a priority. In Oxfordshire it’s clear that this is happening, with several parties working hard to engage homeowners with retrofit and home energy efficiency, including Cosy Homes Oxfordshire’s home retrofit service. But we’re finding again and again that the key barrier to home retrofit is the lack of readiness in the supply chain – made obvious recently in the struggles of the Green Homes Grant to deliver. There’s a clear need to build up the supply chain for retrofit. We can see many potential routes forward to fulfil this need, and in this event we’re going to explore these routes. Day 1 will consist of speaker sessions, with days 2&3 focusing on workshop sessions to enable discussions and idea generation.

More details, including session titles and speakers, will follow soon.