Retrofits in Social Housing
Client
Believe Housing
Year
2021
Location
Durham, UK
Topics
Design Operations
Service Design
Organisational Design
We partnered with Believe housing, a social housing organisation in the North-East to explore their challenge of getting access to tenants homes for retrofits.
To meet the UK's government climate change targets, housing organisations are required to retrofit all homes to lower carbon emissions. Believe housing plans to retrofit 18,000 homes, requiring major investments.
My role in the project was to bring forth my experience of working in the construction industry and parallel struggles that the estates team face to the forth. This enabled realisation of the disruptive nature of retrofits, the vision and the need to include frontline. I also played a part in introducing points of intervention in the journey. Lastly I was responsible to ground the project into strategy and create a business plan, that gained interest for further work and invitation and showcase in some internal and external events.
Discover
If you were in the shoes of a resident, this would mean someone coming into your home, replacing your entire tradition heating system with a renewable air source heat pump, insulating your house so heat stays within and lastly changing the potentially source of energy from fuel to solar. Believe doesn’t plan to do it all at once, but in phases.
This sounds like an house upgrade. Which it is. Had it not been for believes residents being mostly in the older generations and some fuel poor and on benefits. Retrofits are disruptive not just during the time of the renovation but also after as it requires major lifestyle behavorial changes in order to be successful.
Retrofits are huge challenge, for the housing industry. For believe the challenge is to get buy in to the retrofit from the residents and change their behaviours to make all the retrofit investment a success. For the resident the challenge starts with lack of understanding and knowledge of the retrofits itself, make behaviour change even more difficult and timetaking.
Define
While repairs are initiated by the residents, take lesser time and demand less-no behaviour change. retrofits which are initiated by believe,take longer and demand major behaviour changes.
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Making us realise retrofits are a form of radical repair and hence an opportunity to deliver radical care
which is the vision we co-designed, along with a set of principles to ensure alignment in delivery of services
Since retrofits massively disrupts domestic rhythms of a person’s life., Believe will need a way to enable smoother transition not only towards the retrofit journey, but also energy itself. Design for an energy transition will enable a smoother retrofit journey.
How might we deliver a resident-centric service that reflects radical Care from believe and supports the residents in smoother energy transition to enable a smooth retrofit journey?
Develop
We developed a service called BeGreen that aims to put believe’s residents at the centre. The service encourages residents’ behaviour change in energy saving habits through support structures for different personas at an earlier stage prior to retrofit.
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We tested some of our hypothesis around community and learnt :
1. Retrofits & Energy Saving knowledge can contribute majorly in helping people deal better with fuel poverty.
2. When people have issues they go to who they trust. There’s a real trust that residents place in the community that believe can tap into to form relationships for energy savings and retrofit agenda.​
Deliver
The BeGreen service is a community-driven energy savings scheme that incentivises Communities and Believes's residents to change their energy habits before and after retrofits are done. At the heart of the scheme is believe residents whose diverse needs are catered for through four key components.
1. Energy Advisor team is a single point of contact for residents for all matters of energy, the energy advisor helps build efficient systems, clear lines of communication and trust.
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2. Community centres will be used to host events, support believe residents and the wider community in accessing energy saving advice.
3. BeGreen volunteering scheme is designed for those who can spare time to support the community. It is a flexible volunteering scheme that supports energy saving activities within communities.
4. A digital customer portal provides residents with timely data on their energy consumption. It is created for customers who want full autonomy and control and don't want much social engagement or interruption.
​Our proposal did not require a totally new infrastructure, it's about leveraging existing resources within and outside of believe and also re-strategizing some of their approaches to yield stronger impact.We suggested creating a separate budget for funding the energy team. The energy team is crucial to creating the initial trust between the residents and believe and hence make the retrofits possible. They could help believe closely administer the retrofit, internally coordinate and manage workflow. To partner with community centres we suggested believe to redirect and restratergise their community budgets based on the energy savings cause.
Feedback
In Collaboration with:
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Anchit Som, Joanne(Ching-Yen Chiu), Linda Mutunga