69: Whole person, whole place - social relations and energy retrofit
How do our social relations with other people and places influence decisions about domestic energy retrofit?
Becky and Matt reunite at the University of Strathclyde to speak with Professors Lucie Middlemiss and Mark Davis from the University of Leeds, and hear separate case studies from Iain Cairns, Ruth Bookbinder and Giulia Mininni.
Episode Transcript:
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hello and welcome to Local Zero. In today’s episode, we’re talking about improving the energy efficiency of the UK’s housing stock and helping households to lower their energy bills and increase their comfort levels at home.
Matt: Yes, and this week, Becky and I are actually physically in the same place together at the University of Strathclyde. She’s headed up all the way from Cornwall...
Rebecca: Wooh!
Matt: ...and today, we’ll be chatting with Professors Lucie Middlemiss and Mark Davis from the University of Leeds. We will be discussing a UK Energy Research Centre project I’m working with them both on about how our social relations, i.e. our relationships with other people and places, influence our decisions around domestic energy retrofit.
Rebecca: This topic is so important because, at the moment, we’re simply not going deep or fast enough on retrofitting our housing stock in order to meet net zero. The question is whether accounting for our householders’ social relations might help us to design and promote solutions that unlock a nationwide energy efficiency drive.
Matt: We’ll also be joined in today’s episode by Ruth Bookbinder from the University of Leeds, Giulia Mininni from the Science Policy Research Unit, or SPRU, at the University of Sussex and Iain Cairns from the University of Strathclyde. They will be sharing some fresh insights from case studies of the importance of social relations in unlocking energy retrofit.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Just a reminder, do find and follow the pod. Search Local Zero wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe. Do also get in touch with us on Twitter. We are @LocalZeroPod if you want to get involved with the discussions there.
Matt: So, Becky, you’re back in Glasgow. It’s sunny. How does it feel?
Rebecca: Oh, it’s so lovely. I mean I did arrive yesterday in the horrible drizzle that Glasgow is so well known for but today, I woke up and it was absolutely beautiful. So I feel like I’ve brought a little bit of Cornwall with me [laughter].
Matt: You have! Yeah, I mean it really is starting to feel very summery out there. How are things down in Cornwall? New job, new house, new life... how are things?
Rebecca: Yeah, really good, thanks, Matt. It’s just so nice to be back in Glasgow and seeing familiar sights but I’m not going to lie; I do love living five minutes from the beach and I managed to get in for my first wild swim of the year over the weekend.
Matt: Oh wow! Lovely.
Rebecca: Brilliant.
Matt: Yes, the wild swimming in the Clyde is pretty wild [laughter], so I wouldn’t recommend it. Obviously, we’ve got lots going on. As we approach summer, I was starting to take stock of the winter and in my typical fashion [laughter], I was trying to understand how much gas I’ve actually consumed. What was the damage done? I think many of us will be taking stock in a similar way and I have to admit that I came across a pretty unpleasant surprise, Becky, which was...
Rebecca: Oh, no [laughter].
Matt: ...my gas meter had only accounted for a third of my consumption.
Rebecca: Oh my goodness.
Matt: So we can blame the imperial versus metric wars on this but basically, it was measuring it in cubic feet but Octopus thought it was cubic metres. But, in short, I was looking at this and thinking, ‘Oh my goodness! I am way, way short. Am I going to get hammered with a big bill?’ Thankfully, as I’m sitting here, it’s been dealt with. Kudos to Octopus for taking responsibility for their error and resolving this but it really put into sharp contrast how expensive winter was and how much of an ostrich I’ve been about it to be honest.
Rebecca: Well, I wonder if there are people now sitting at home and thinking, ‘Oh, I wonder if mine was the other way,’ after seeing the massive bills that they had this winter just because it has been absolutely savage. The fact of the matter is that most people are probably not looking at their meters and their usage in the way that you are. I had a similar experience actually with my electricity meter. So in December, as part of the big retrofit project that we’ve been doing at home, I got my SMETS1 smart meter upgraded to the SMETS2 smart meter.
Matt: So SMETS1 is the dumber version of...
Rebecca: Yeah, that’s my understanding [laughter]. I don’t know the technical details but SMETS2 is certainly smarter than SMETS1. For months now, when I log on to look at my energy usage, it just says ‘You are still in your 14-day cooling-off window.’ It just hadn’t connected. So I really have to question what I’ve been paying. I mean I’ve been paying a direct debit and actually managed to put in my usage and thankfully, it was not far off.
Matt: I mean there are two of us sitting around the table and we’re both having these big, big fundamental problems. As I’ve said on the pod many times before, I work as the chair and trustee of South Seeds and we have a long line of people constantly coming in who haven’t been billed correctly. This is basic stuff. At the end of the day, going to net zero is going to be far more complicated than metering somebody correctly for their consumption. People are coming in with thousands of pounds of debt they didn’t know they had.
Rebecca: Also, could you imagine paying for another service, outside of the energy sector, where it costs you as much and it was just as poor quality in terms of what you were finding out? I think it’s just shocking in terms of customer service apart from anything else.
Matt: Quite right. It wasn’t actually on the back of this mishap but I was aware that I needed to cut my gas consumption and so I’ve actually signed up...
Rebecca: Of course you have.
Matt: ...to the Energy Systems Catapult Living Lab. I’m part of their smart thermostat trial. A company called Tado has provided the equipment. In effect, this is a smart thermostat which is meant to adjust for the weather, whether you’re in or out of the house, but also on each of the radiators, they’ve taken off the dumb valves and they’ve put on these smart valves. From my phone, as I have it in front of me, I can tell you the temperature in all of my rooms. I can tell you the humidity which I don’t really need to know. It’s like being a conductor with an orchestra.
Rebecca: That is amazing. I actually think that’s brilliant. As regular listeners of the pod will know, I recently got a heat pump which has been phenomenal but it has taken a lot of working and I’ve actually manually been twisting those valves in the different rooms to try and make sure that the temperature is as I want it. I just have one thermostat and I don’t have multiple different sensors in all the different rooms like you. It used to be on the wall right by the front door in the coldest part of the house where there wasn’t really a radiator anyway and so it just felt absolutely ridiculous. So now we’ve got one that you can move around and we leave it in our main living room but, of course, I want my bedrooms to be a lot colder. We’ve almost had to turn the valves off completely to get it working properly.
Matt: Cook in your sleep, yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah, pretty much.
Matt: Again, this is meant to be relatively straightforward stuff in terms of getting the temperature right but it’s been a real surprise to me how complicated it’s been and how informed you need those installers to be because the kinds of questions that were coming out during this really required that person to have done many hundreds of installs before and be not just an electrician, which is important, but to understand thermal dynamics and to understand comfort levels which we constantly talk about on this show. But I’m so jealous of you and that’s the next thing.
Rebecca: Well, I’m jealous of your multi-room monitoring but how difficult was it to actually get it installed? Was it quite a complex process?
Matt: No, it took the best part of an hour really.
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: Yeah, it was surprisingly quick.
Rebecca: That’s better than my heat pump. It took six days [laughter].
Matt: Anyway, one day, we’ll get into the dumb side of smart meters and smart thermostats...
Rebecca: Yeah, love it.
Matt: ...because a whole lot of stuff came out about whether or not it was modulating the boiler. We’re getting into really geeky territory but for those who are looking at their energy bills and thinking, ‘How do I lower them?’ then actually, these topics matter.
[Music flourish]
Let’s go on to much bigger issues at hand. I opened the news today and The Guardian was leading on a news story about methane leaks or venting, as they often call it rather than flaring which is where you burn the gas which you often see on oil rigs. These are methane leaks in Turkmenistan which are the equivalent annually of the UK’s carbon emissions. Now, Becky, we’ve spoken about this. How did it make you feel? Did it make you feel empowered? Did it give you the agency to make a difference to climate change or not?
Rebecca: It made me feel so frustrated at how much I try and how little that means in comparison to this but do you know what, Matt? It also reminded me of a study that I’ve seen previously which looked at depression in adults and found that the only common factor underlying that was whether people had listened to or read the news or not [laughter]. So it doesn’t surprise me that we’re seeing this in the news and I’m feeling very disempowered by it all.
Matt: As I said, it’s actually more than the UK’s emissions. They’re not just equivalent but actually a little bit more. Often, I get annoyed with people who say, ‘You know what’s happening in China, the US and India. We’re just a pin prick.’ I’m often arguing against that and saying, ‘No, it all matters,’ and it does. It’s all cumulative. Now what I would say is there is a little good news story here potentially in that we’ve only found out about these leaks because of satellite technology.
Rebecca: Okay, that’s impressive.
Matt: It’s only been in the last couple of years. We only now know the scale of the problem but also, this is an issue that can be dealt with basically by a singular actor. We’re about to talk on this show now about the complications around getting a household to change but there is a good news story here because methane is the most pernicious of common greenhouse gases.
Rebecca: We’ve discovered it and we can do something about it. The other thing that I also want to just step back on is that at an individual level, it’s not just about the energy balances and the carbon dioxide. In the back of my mind, I was thinking of the value side of things when I went for installing a heat pump and making changes to my home but it certainly wasn’t the thing that was front of mind driving the decision. There are so many other reasons... like we were talking about warmth in the home, lowering pollution in our cities and better and cleaner air to breathe.
Matt: But it is a factor and it’s an important one. I think that’s a useful segue now into this discussion around social relations and the reasons why people do or do not make positive choices around domestic energy retrofit. It’s all these connections between place and people, whether it’s workplace, home life or all of these. These all feed into making a decision around that kitchen table. So I think we ought to bring the guests in.
Rebecca: Absolutely.
[Music flourish]
Mark: I’m Professor Mark Davis. I’m Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Leeds.
Lucie: I’m Lucie Middlemiss and I’m Professor of Environment and Society at the University of Leeds.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Welcome both of you, Mark and Lucie. It’s a pleasure to have you on. We’ve been colleagues for a little while and I’ve been promising to have you along and host you on this pod. It’s been long overdue and so I’m really thrilled you’re here. Today, we’re talking about the social relations of retrofit and before we get stuck into exactly what that means, if can just maybe lay out the problem or at least the challenge facing us with regards to energy retrofit with a focus on domestic properties. So what is the situation today regarding retrofit and how bad is it? I wonder maybe, Lucie, if we could begin with you. I know you’ve been doing a lot of work around fuel poverty and obviously, this year has been particularly pernicious for millions of households. How bad is it? How slow is progress being made?
Lucie: I guess we live in a country in which the housing stock is relatively old. It has also not been maintained in a way that might result in it being more energy-efficient. So if you look at the efficiency of the housing stock in the UK versus the housing stock in Denmark, let’s say, we all know that Denmark is quite an efficient place and the UK is half as efficient. What that means is, effectively, we’re living in leaky buildings. Whether we live in the private sector, the social or private rented sector, we’re all facing this heat loss effectively which means that we can’t keep our buildings as warm as we would like. This winter, we’ve had ridiculously high energy bills and as a result, we’ve seen a lot more people struggling with keeping warm enough just because it’s so expensive to heat. So we have this sort of heat escaping but also the inputs, in terms of the amount of heat that we can afford to buy, are reducing as well. These things cause really big problems not just for the fuel poor but also a fair bit up the income scale because people just can’t afford to keep adequately warm.
Matt: Absolutely. Mark, do you have anything to add there just in terms of how bad things are and how slow progress currently is?
Mark: Yeah, I think a significance, particularly in terms of net-zero ambitions, is also worth bearing in mind in that kind of policy sense. We know from a 2020 study by BEIS (Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy) that residential buildings account for approximately 25% of total energy use in the UK. One of the relatively sobering fact packs that come out of a study by the Environmental Audit Committee on the back of that is that 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are here now. So often, in conversations about energy efficiency, we look to new builds and we look to engineering out some of these problems in modern methods of construction and various other new building formats but actually, given the age and the state of the housing stock in the UK and, as I say, because 80% of it will still be here in 2050, the urgency of retrofitting that housing stock is really dramatic. At the moment, energy policy and a whole suite of national policy frameworks are falling really short of finding the right mix of incentives and enablers to first get that message into households but also then smoothing the process through which households can begin to engage with... ‘Right, you’ve sold me on the climate message. You’ve sold me on the need for net zero. How do you want me to do that?’ That goes right across different tenure types for different buildings. It goes right across the income spectrum as Lucie was saying there about the fuel poor right up to the able-to-pay. So there’s a real research problem that has to be addressed given the state we’re in with our housing stock in the UK.
Rebecca: I’m so glad that you brought up the policy perspective. I was saying to Matt earlier actually how I’m still reeling weeks after the Energy Security Strategy was released and the lack of focus on the demand side; the lack of focus on what we actually need to do to make our building stock, homes and businesses more efficient. To me, it just seems like a no-brainer in that it can deliver so many benefits. So I’m really glad that you’ve brought that up. Certainly, I think that aligns with what we’ve seen. We saw a lot more action around energy efficiency maybe five to ten years ago than we’re seeing today. So maybe can you just help shine a light on why we’re not seeing that retrofitting at the pace that we need? Why has it dropped off? You mentioned the able-to-pay, those people who perhaps own their homes and are able to afford this. Why are we not seeing more action with that? Mark, maybe you can kick us off with that.
Mark: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. It’s actually one of the main starting points for the Whole Person, Whole Place project that we got funded through the UK Energy Research Centre which was this kind of observation that you would often think, looking narrowly at energy policy, that the primary barrier to the delivery of retrofit at scale is financial and that the big barrier here is around money. In 2020, the UK’s Treasury announced a suite of post-Covid-19 economic recovery measures that were climate-facing and that included a £2 billion package aimed at a domestic green recovery via a number of frameworks including the Green Homes Grant which was to the tune of £2 billion of investment and a further £100 million via the Clean Heat Grant. Taken together, those measures represented less than 1% of what was calculated as the £250 billion that was going to be needed for residential retrofit in the UK and so a real pebble in the ocean in terms of financial support. So you might think, ‘Okay, it’s clearly finance that’s the barrier,’ but one of the other things we did right at the start of the project was an initial scoping study and we found out that actually, in the first three months of lockdown in the UK, homes spent £55 billion on cosmetic or aesthetic renovations to their homes during that first period. It was an average of £4,000 per home. It quickly became apparent that finance, particularly for that bracket that we think of as the able-to-pay, was not the primary barrier to retrofit being undertaken. People were perfectly happy to spend money, whether that was borrowed or whether it was through savings or inheritance money and those kinds of categories. They were prepared to go through the relatively painful structural intervention in the home and all the disruption that we know that causes for people and yet energy efficiency was just not part of the conversation at any stage. They weren’t being prompted to do that on the trade side. There was a clear lack of incentives for trades on the supply side of this to get involved in energy efficiency but we really took as a starting point for our project exactly that question. If the finance is there from the point of view of people who are willing to spend money cosmetically on the home, how do we begin to understand some of the barriers to undertaking energy-efficiency measures in that space? I think this is where Lucie and I have been really leading this project to look at that question.
Matt: I’m going to come to Lucie now. It’s just an observation but when we started this project – as I say, I’m working with you both on this – finance was cheap and energy was cheap or relatively cheap compared to today. Now, energy is very expensive and finance is more expensive. So maybe we can circle back to this at the end but, Lucie, I just wanted you to reflect on... admittedly, maybe not enough money has been spent in this space to really drive energy efficiency forward but I think the starting point of the project was that we’re spending money often in the wrong way and we’re taking quite an economically rational approach to householders’ decision-making. This project, at its heart, takes a social relational approach where it’s about people’s relationship with place and other people, whether it’s their family or their workplace. I just wanted you maybe to frame what an economically rational approach means, why maybe it’s doomed to fail and what this social relational approach offers.
Lucie: Yeah, that’s exactly where we came into the project and maybe to pick up on what Mark was saying, finance is not the primary barrier but we really have this massive tendency to see this whole problem in terms of money. Just to give an example, we typically talk about the payback period of investment in retrofit. You insulate your house but how long does it take for you to get the money back from what you spent on, let’s say, solid wall insulation? That whole way of thinking or way of conceptualising this assumes that people are acting rationally in spending that money. It assumes that the reason they’re doing that solid wall insulation is to make money back on their energy bills. Actually, that assumption is really flawed. It kind of narrows down the whole discussion about retrofit in terms of the person and how they spend their money. Actually, we’re not talking about that because why would you solid wall insulate your house? Why would you do that? It might be because the outside of the house needed rendering and you heard this was a good way of making it look nice. It might be because you’re cold in your house and you want to feel more cosy and make it a more cosy environment. It might be because your neighbour has done it and you’re looking next door and thinking, ‘Oh, that looks nice,’ and talking to your neighbour about how they did it and following their lead. What we’re doing really with thinking about this is stepping back from that very narrow focus on a person, how they spend their money and things like what the payback period is and we’re opening out. What are we opening out? We’re opening questions about who that person is, who they have contact with, what other people around them are doing and who they live with even. Who lives in this house and what does that mean about the way that the house is used and then the objectives that they have in terms of what money they might want to spend on that house? We also want to know where they are. Where they are really matters because when you live in a particular area, the likelihood is that the housing stock around you is quite similar. I live in a part of the world where we have a lot of stone terraces. We have some 1920s semi-detached housing. These particular types of housing in my area will be very different to where you live, Matt, in Glasgow where there are tenement buildings and they need a different kind of treatment. The other question is, for instance, what do you have around you as a supportive set of institutions that can really help in terms of the way you’re doing the work? Do you have a local NGO that can advise you on retrofitting? What is your local council like? How much do they know about this? The last thing is what kind of money have they got or what kind of money do they want to spend on this kind of thing and how are they spending it. Maybe Mark is better placed to talk about the nature of money and how it’s used in retrofit.
Matt: I tried to offer a terrible analogy the other day after a couple of glasses of wine [laughter] and it was something about this project which was essentially we think of an Englishman or an Englishwoman’s home as their castle but actually, the approach to retrofit means there’s a big moat around that and none of these are connected but our project is trying to lower down the drawbridge and connect them. It’s terrible but it helps me [laughter].
Rebecca: Matt, it’s just a snapshot into the way your brain thinks. That’s phenomenal [laughter].
Matt: This is why I don’t write the policy briefs [laughter].
Rebecca: I think this is really fascinating and what I’m hearing from you, Lucie, is that there are lots of reasons why people might do something and it’s not because we’re sat there working out the financial gain but actually, it’s far more about our lives and our livelihoods and that context is critically important to all of this because we’re not just these little actors, as you say, Matt, within our castles surrounded by a moat but incredibly influenced by what’s going on around us. I guess this talks to why we might need to be taking this perspective. Maybe, Mark, you can help us here to just shine some light on some of the additional insights. So by taking this broader perspective, how is this helping you understand what needs to be done to support householders and encourage householders to actually engage in retrofit projects?
Mark: The point that Lucie makes there about the different relations around money is certainly one of those additional insights. We’ve heard right across the data that we’ve been gathering in the project in different contexts and we should probably say that we’ve got three case study sites. We’ve got Glasgow, Leeds and Brighton. In Glasgow, we’ve been looking at multiple-occupancy buildings. There’s clearly a really interesting relational dynamic there where it’s more than one household making a decision on what happens to the fabric of a building. In Leeds, we’ve got mortgaged owner-occupiers, so there is more decision-making capacity but a lot of negotiation within households around how money is allocated and what kind of structural intervention is done. There’s pressure from children who have maybe been involved in school strikes or Extinction Rebellion or certainly become very, very climate-sensitive and the pressure they’re putting on parents to think about the impact on their home. Down in Brighton and working with colleagues at SPRU, looking at the relationships between students and landlords but really the private rental sector. What those different tenure types reveal is that as well as simplifying the financial conversation here that it’s individuals making decisions about homes driven by optimal financial return, there’s often a willingness to position households as somewhat universal; that all homes are the same and all homeowners are going to make similar decisions. Well, we know quite clearly that that’s not the case and the incentives for people who are lucky enough to have a mortgage to own their own home are very different to trying to persuade a landlord with a suite of rental properties that they need to be looking at the energy efficiency of their portfolio as well. So that’s one and I think the other side of that around money is we’ve heard from different households in our case studies that some households are very, very debt-averse. They don’t want to borrow to take this money. There’s a real willingness to think about using inheritance money for one-off big interventions in the home and that’s really fascinating from a social relations perspective because what it reveals is that that money is arriving into the home with a set of values around it linked to a kind of caring relationship. This is often from a parent who has had a long caring relationship with a daughter or a son. That money arrives in the household with that narrative around it and so spending it in a way that continues that caring relationship by improving the comfort, convenience and well-being of family members in the home makes a lot of sense to people versus the idea of borrowing extensively and getting into debt to do this because someone has been motivated by a relatively arbitrary and distant climate change objective in 2050. So what the social relations approach gives us is a real grounding of a lot of these initiatives and interventions that need to happen really into the day-to-day conversations and relationships that people have in their daily lives. Where are they going to get the money from to finance the work, what are the narratives and values around different forms of money and how that’s navigated in the household but also where do they turn to for advice and guidance? As Lucie mentioned, doing this because a neighbour has done it is really powerful. I actually ran a version of a workshop that we’re going to be using this Friday with my students last week. Suddenly, they were telling me that people in their street... five people came and spoke to their dad who had put an EV charging point in and wanted to know how it worked, how much it cost, whether it was saving money and what the disruption was like. All of these kinds of conversations that happen beyond the purview of energy policy are actually really vital in persuading people to make that decision to go and do it. It’s rarely about a rational economic decision. It’s much more through these kinds of relational dynamics.
Matt: I couldn’t agree more. I know that both of you are being asked by various different quarters about the policy implications of this. We won’t name parties particularly here because I think all of them will be writing their manifestos. Lucie, taking what Mark has said there, what would be a couple of recommendations on the back of what we’re learning from this project that prospective governments or existing governments might look at and say, ‘Right, this is how I take a social relational approach to retrofit forward and package it.’ I’m not asking for a specific policy but it’s almost like an approach to this. What would be your starter for ten?
Lucie: I suppose the first thing is let’s put aside that very narrow focus. Stop thinking about people and the payback period [laughter] as if people only think about the payback period. The second step is to think about who we are trying to influence here. We think that the able-to-pay can afford to do some of this themselves. Where are they within, let’s say, the Leeds area? Who are they? How can we help them to make those choices in the future? That’s kind of where we’re at. We do need to think about this a bit more deeply and we’re hoping to follow up our research project with another one to develop these ideas a little bit. I think we can start already to say that we know certain types of people are more likely to apply for energy grants. We know that certain types of people are more likely to be first movers in this process of, for instance, fitting heat pumps in their homes or putting solid wall insulation around the homes and these kinds of things. What can we learn about them in terms of how to change the way we address policy? It’s about not thinking narrowly in terms of the payback period but trying to understand how those context factors affect the way that they make those decisions.
Rebecca: I love that and does that mean that we need to really be looking at a much stronger relationship between national and local because from everything you’ve said, and particularly around how important place is, local authorities and local councils know their areas the best. They know where those people are. They have an understanding. Is this something where we really need to see much more devolution into local policymaking?
Lucie: Definitely. Local authorities also understand their housing stock. Very often, local authorities own a lot of housing stock in their area and they tend to own all forms of housing stock. In Leeds, where I am, the council owns some back-to-back terraces which are a very distinctive type of building to Leeds. They also own tower blocks. They also own semis. They own all these different types of tenure and so they really understand the sorts of challenges that different people face. They understand the people, they understand the housing type and they understand the different places within their authority. As a result, they’re a really key actor I would say in retrofit.
Matt: Mark, anything to add there just on the policy recommendations or how you would nudge and prod any incoming government in terms of the direction they ought to take to ensure that we are retrofitting at the pace and depth that’s required and unlocking homes that maybe haven’t thought about this using a social relational approach?
Mark: I completely agree with the point about local authorities. I mean my wider work has been looking at how we bolster income streams into local authorities for net-zero infrastructure projects for a little while now. I think Lucie is right in terms of the oversight that councils have in terms of their housing stock and also the other buildings that they own. We need to also look at commercial buildings and the energy performance of commercial buildings as well right across the council estate. The other thing I would say about local authorities and that wider devolution narrative that we’re getting from many sides, as I playfully dance around your invitation to think about an incoming government, is the sense in which there is a role for local authorities also specifically in that relational dimension. Local authorities are real anchor points for all sorts of different relationships that exist right through procurement for net-zero infrastructure work taking place to provide means through which people can find out more information about retrofitting their own homes. I think there’s a real advocacy role for local authorities, as trusted actors, to really help with the communication side of this. Some of the most successful initiatives, where we’ve seen whereby you do get street-by-street retrofit intervention, have been a kind of one-stop shop, community-led initiative that the council has had some kind of role in brokering or in delivering. So right across the spectrum of the things that we could and should do next using this approach, the role of local authorities and councils is absolutely pivotal.
Rebecca: To close us out, I’ve got a question for you both; perhaps a future visioning or fairy godmother-type question. I’m wondering if you can summarise in a sentence or so what we still really need to know more about or do more about. So if somebody was to magic up £1 million for each of you, what would you do with that?
Lucie: It’s always very nice to think about how you might spend that kind of money [laughter]. I think we’ve done a lot of the groundwork in the project that we’ve done so far. We’ve done a lot of thinking about who this actor or person is that thinks about retrofit and might do something about it. It’s felt a lot like a series of case studies that have taught us a lot but then what would be really nice would be to take that to the country as a whole and come up with a more solid set of recommendations that any local authority could use in order to be able to plan their retrofit relationally rather than rationally. That’s quite a big objective but, in a way, I think we have to scale up what we’ve done in order to be able to give it back, effectively, for particularly local authorities I would say to work on this.
Matt: Sorry, a very quick reflection there. There’s something there, Lucie, also that these similarities are just as important as the differences between local areas or, indeed, regions. It would be fascinating to understand how things are different in Cornwall versus Northumberland, versus East Renfrewshire, versus Greater London.
Lucie: Maybe just to add to that, Matt, that you’re absolutely and maybe those links are not being made at the moment because people aren’t thinking about it in these terms. If you think about the problem relationally, you start to think, ‘We’ve also got a large population of people who live also on lower incomes. What are you doing with those leads?’ Bradford says, ‘We’re doing this.’ Do you see what I mean? Those sorts of conversations could be happening better if we were thinking about who and where.
Rebecca: Mark, if you’ve got a sentence that summarises what you would do with your £1 million.
Mark: One of the interesting things about the conversation we’ve had and the project more broadly is that energy policy in this space is very much looking at demand. How do we grow demand in terms of people being able to do this? Where are they? What incentives do they need? What is the right relational mix to make these things happen? Lucie is right. Our ambition here is to scale that right across the UK. With that kind of investment in a project, we’d be looking for us not to take our eye off the supply side and looking at the relational dynamics that exist for the trade side and how they often deliver the same kind of energy intervention in homes, usually a combi boiler or something like that because they already have an existing network of supply that means that’s the most straightforward and frictionless experience for them. So retrofit could and should be a real green skills, green jobs revolution for the country. So where is the investment going to come from in terms of skilling and reskilling the trade side so that if we grow that demand, as we need to do, it can actually be met relatively efficiently and we don’t find further blockages on that side?
Rebecca: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Lucie. What a fabulous conversation that was and I can’t wait to dig into this a little bit more and hear about some of the case studies.
Matt: Thank you, guys. Speak soon.
Mark: Cheers, guys. Thank you.
Lucie: Thanks very much.
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Matt: So we’ve just heard from two leading experts on how our social relationships impact our decisions around domestic energy retrofit or, in other words, how we improve the energy efficiency of our homes but how does this work in practice and what examples can we point to in the real world? Well, to offer some insights, we’ll speak with three researchers from the same UK Energy Research Centre project who led on three different case studies that covered Glasgow, Brighton and Otley just outside of Leeds in West Yorkshire. First up, we’re going to hear from Dr Iain Cairns, a lecturer with me at the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde Business School. Iain is also a member of the same UK Energy Research Centre project on social relations and retrofit and he is now going to talk about his case study which he led into the multi-occupancy Victorian tenement housing in the Southside of Glasgow.
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Matt: Iain, welcome and hello. How are you?
Iain: Very well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Matt: Could you possibly explain to our listeners what your case study was about and why it was of particular interest to our project around the social relations of retrofit?
Iain: Yeah, of course. The case study is of the Crosshill area in the Southside of Glasgow. We thought that would be interesting for a variety of reasons. As you mentioned earlier, it’s a conservation area and it has lots of old buildings which are quite difficult to heat, so there was potentially something interesting there to look at. They’re flats and these tenements are old sandstone buildings of three or four storeys high and they have maybe five to eight flats in them depending on how large they are. We were quite interested in how the owners of these properties reached agreement with each other. We were also interested because they’re mixed tenure. While most residents are owner-occupiers, there are also privately rented properties there as well and so that added another dynamic to the situation. Also, there’s quite varied income in the tenements and so that means there are all sorts of negotiations that have to take place about how we can pay for the interventions in the communal areas.
Matt: So we’ve got a very busy and very densely-populated building with numerous homes within the same house if you will. So there’s lots of social relations here to unpick; not just social relations between the occupants of the building but between the occupants of the building and the factor – not a common word beyond Scotland I might say – or the manager responsible for the building. I just wondered if you might talk a little bit about the key findings from the case study. What did you uncover and what maybe, in particular, was surprising about it?
Iain: First of all, something that wasn’t maybe that surprising was that retrofit in flats involves a lot more relational work to reach an agreement between multiple owners. It’s very difficult. On the other hand, what we find is that there are tremendous relational resources there and so people support each other and they work together. They can draw on a broader range of networks and connections in order to get things done and to learn. Yes, definitely, property managers were one of the things that came up as being really important. They do a lot of relational work. They try and organise people that live up the stairwell in the building but we also find that because they’re just tasked with maintenance, it means that they don’t really have an energy-efficiency role. We also found that because they’re just helping to make things just tick away in the background and maintaining the buildings, it means that it can undermine the grassroots activism if you will.
Matt: So they don’t necessarily have responsibility for capital expenditure to add something. It’s more about maintaining the status quo.
Iain: Exactly. Simply because they’re there, it often means that people don’t engage with each other in a way that they otherwise would in order to actually achieve things together.
Matt: So we have this quite busy space. We don’t necessarily have the jurisdiction or the responsibilities around making those strategic interventions in retrofit. So what were the key takeaways and implications? Are you now reaching out to Glasgow City Council, Scottish Government and also other rental or other agencies and what are you suggesting we should be doing differently?
Iain: One thing that came from this was that there is tremendous potential if we could leverage the relational role of property managers to drive this forward but a real issue is that they’re not trusted parties. Lots of people have problems with their managers and they’re accused of underperformance and overpricing. So something there has to help. I think it was in 2014 that there was some legislation that went in to try and regulate property managers a little bit better but I think that that has to be built upon. I think also property managers, because they’re not familiar with the energy-efficiency space, that some kind of support has to be provided for them so that they can know a lot more about how to go about helping residents with retrofit.
Matt: A final word then maybe on residents’ associations which is something that you and I have spoken about a bit around actually bringing those residents together. Was that a key finding when you spoke to them?
Iain: In the UK more broadly, it’s very unusual not having compulsory owners’ associations to assist with that kind of community activism and allow a bottom-up approach to retrofit. I think it would be enormously beneficial if we weren’t an outlier and we did have owners’ associations to drive this forward.
Matt: Brilliant. Iain, thank you so much and we look forward to having you back again soon.
Iain: Thank you very much for having me.
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Matt: So a fascinating insight from Iain there into the dynamic between tenement householders in these multi-occupancy buildings and also those responsible for managing their properties such as the factors. But next up, we hear from Giulia Mininni from the University of Sussex. Guilia’s case study examined the case of Brighton with a specific focus on rental housing in a student area and their landlords.
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Matt: Hello and welcome Guilia.
Guilia: Hello and thank you.
Matt: Lovely to have you aboard. First and foremost, what was your case study and what was your rationale for choosing it?
Guilia: Here at Sussex, we are looking at the private rented sector and the challenges of retrofitting within the private rented sector and the decision-making process of landlords. This is also because it’s something that hasn’t been researched as much. We are also looking at Brighton because of specific challenges. First of all, there’s the issue that in Brighton, there are a lot of Regency, Victorian and Edwardian buildings and so the stock is quite old. There are some challenges in terms of retrofitting old buildings and also because most of these buildings are also in conservation areas and are listed buildings.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely and obviously, with landlords and tenants, you have this split-incentive dilemma where if the landlord invests, it’s not necessarily the landlord who benefits, particularly if the tenant is paying. So we have this situation and also, just to paint a picture of Brighton, it has a very, very vibrant and dynamic student community and lots of people piling into the same houses and enjoying their lives. What were really the key findings from this study when digging into this dynamic between student tenants and their landlords?
Guilia: What we found was that definitely families, friends, tradespeople, retrofit companies and cooperatives and the relationship with the local authority and letting agencies, which are the key actors operating in the area regarding the private rented sector, are essential in this retrofit process and the decision-making process for the landlords. Contrary to other studies that focused on this perspective, we can say that the relationship with tradespeople was something that really played a key role in pushing for adopting retrofit options for the landlords.
Matt: So when you say tradespeople, you’re talking about the individuals who are maybe starting to prepare these older properties for students before they maybe sign their tenancy.
Guilia: Sure. It’s those that work within the sector such as plumbers, builders and so on and they do provide retrofit options basically for the landlords.
Matt: So why were the plumbers, electricians or tradespeople providing this energy-efficiency advice? I mean they’re not living in the house. What would be the reason for that?
Guilia: What we found is that actually our sample of landlords, perhaps because they were landlords that belonged to the Sussex Student Letting Agency which is basically an agency that works specifically with students and was set up within the University of Sussex, was considered perhaps a sample of good landlords who were interested in the wellbeing of their tenants. As you were mentioning before, there is always this dilemma of the split incentive and so usually, landlords are not really keen on improving their properties because they don’t benefit directly from the improvement within the household. However, in this case, we found they actually did care about their tenants and specifically, they cared about their wellbeing and comfort.
Matt: It sounds like the ideal landlord in that regard. What are the implications of your findings? We’ve got a set of manifestos that are being prepared today I guess for a forthcoming general election. What would be your message to them?
Guilia: I think something that’s really important that is perhaps missing in policy is an emphasis on place and looking at what the assets were, the specific geographical issues and building-related issues that are present in different localities and in different places and how this can actually support and provide opportunities or otherwise, they can constrain the energy-efficiency process of homes. I think that’s really important together with, of course, the relations and the networks that landlords have to improve their properties.
Matt: Excellent. Thank you, Guilia, and thank you for coming along.
Guilia: Thank you.
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Matt: So fascinating there to get a sense of how the energy-efficiency decision-making of the rental sector, especially on targeting students, is shaped by our social relations. In this regard, the relations between the student and the landlord but also the landlord and these other parties, whether these be tradespeople or the university. Now, we move on to pastures new of our final case study. We explore the case of Otley, a small and historic market and mill town outside of Leeds in West Yorkshire and with a very high concentration of old, high-density housing. How are social relations impacting householders’ decisions about energy retrofit here? To get a sense of this, we speak with Ruth Bookbinder from the University of Leeds to learn more. Hello and welcome, Ruth.
Ruth: Hi, thanks for having me.
Matt: Excellent. This is a case study close to my heart. I did my PhD in Leeds and often, at a weekend, we would get out of the city, head towards Wharfedale and one of the first stops on the road that we would decamp in would be Otley. It’s a beautiful market town right on the wharf there with a gorgeous river. I just wonder if you could paint a picture of this case study. What is Otley like? Why did you choose this case study?
Ruth: Yeah, absolutely. I think we wanted to choose somewhere that was a bit outside the city centre and not actually fully within it and look at very specific types of buildings. As you said, they’re older buildings and much like most of the housing stock in the UK, they need specific types of work. They’re quite hard to target for these more intensive retrofits. We were also looking at the owner-occupiers who were in that able-to-pay sector. That’s obviously very broad and we can argue about what able-to-pay means, particularly in the context of a cost-of-living crisis but these are people who, theoretically, should be the ones engaging with the incentives to get retrofit done in their homes but aren’t doing it. So we were looking at people who had self-identified as doing extensive renovations on their homes because we wanted to find the people who were spending money to upgrade their homes but maybe weren’t necessarily taking that step to go into those full, energy-orientated retrofits.
Matt: What was particularly interesting about your case? What were the findings that have fallen out of it? Is there anything that particularly surprised you?
Ruth: Like all the case studies, we found that social relations played a huge role. For instance, that’s relations with family and friends and that played an important role in the types of work that people would choose to do in their homes. Maybe it’s about creating a more open living space to accommodate your family and social life. Maybe it’s making sure that your boiler is actually just able to cope with having family visiting. It was the type of work when people were deciding to get work done and wanting to avoid working with young children in the house with the extra disruption. That was really important. Obviously, there are the relations around trust with tradespeople being very important and that anxiety of having people working in your house and living space is something that a lot of people can relate to. Also, that’s linked to relations with identity, particularly for single women and their interactions with tradespeople were often quite fraught or tense situations. Obviously, that’s something that needs more investigation in terms of the retrofit side, particularly how far identity might turn people off and fear of those relations might turn people off getting work done. It was interesting to see how that played out in the context of getting work done for their homes. Perhaps one of the most striking findings we had, particularly in relation to retrofit policy, was a really deep aversion to incurring any debt to get work done on their homes. People didn’t want to seek loans. It was very much language about the proper way to do this is through savings or maybe you have an inheritance or you earned it. You don’t get work done on your home through a loan. It’s something extra. A couple of interviewees referred to debt as being the heaviest thing you can hang around your neck. There’s a really strong aversion to taking out extra funds.
Matt: Yeah, which is interesting given that almost owner-occupiers, or certainly the majority, have mortgages and that is the heaviest debt to hang around your neck. Previously, when we were looking through the findings, we found that people would compartmentalise different types of money for different things and some people would associate it being okay to attach debt to certain things like owning a house but what you’re saying is it’s not necessarily improving the energy efficiency of the house. I guess now I’m thinking about the implications of this. As I mentioned to Guilia before, we’ve got manifestos being developed left, right and centre by different parties. What do we do with these findings? You’ve mentioned a few like aversion or acceptance of debt and also these kinds of life junctures where people feel it’s most appropriate to make these changes but also people’s willingness to engage with certain social relations given their own self-identity and others. What do we do with this, Ruth? How do we package this?
Ruth: I think in terms of the question around debt and financial packages, that’s a huge thing for government policies because it means we really have to step away from this tendency to view homeowners as these rational actors that are just waiting for the right financial package to come along and then they’re going to do the work as soon as they find the right financial package. That’s obviously not the case. There has to be an understanding about maybe catching people at the right time, whether or not that’s when they’re looking to undertake significant renovations on their house, and that’s when you get in and say, ‘While you’re having this disruption, is this when you also want to be doing this retrofit work?’ It’s about feeding into disruption as opposed to adding new disruption to it. I think also it’s about trying to design financial incentives in a way that isn’t just about this right financial package and isn’t about framing this as a loan. I think it’s about recognising that people might be a bit sceptical that these packages are going to deliver the savings that they’re supposed to, particularly with rising energy costs. Maybe changing the tone of that debate and changing the normative reason why you do it is important.
Matt: Maybe we can finish just on your point about people’s willingness to engage in that social relational work and that building of relationships. Your example was, for instance, a woman looking to bring tradespeople into her home. This feels really important. If people don’t feel safe and willing to build these relationships, then how do you get somebody around to retrofit your home? Are there any insights you have there of that example or others?
Ruth: I think something that’s important to look at is framing this as work. This is labour. It takes time to build trust and find the people to do it. That’s why I think the local one-stop shop is actually a really interesting idea because it really reduces the amount of social labour and social work that people have to do to seek out the trades and seek out those right grants, packages or policies for them. That speaks to something we found which was that homeowners really liked having almost a shopfront that they could go to. They liked knowing that there was a physical space that they could approach if they had an issue or if they had a question. I think trying to lessen that burden on homeowners to find all the information themselves is something that’s quite important to take into account going forward.
Matt: Very important, Ruth. Thank you so much. Excellent to hear there from Ruth about this case study from Otley which I think unveils a whole set of different insights. Special thanks really to all of our guests there for how our social networks and our social relationships are shaping our decisions to improve the energy efficiency of our homes. It turns out it isn’t just as simple as financial decision-making based on spreadsheets, return of interest and rates of return. This isn’t surprising because we are human after all. Thank you to our guests.
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Rebecca: You’ve been listening to Local Zero. A big thank you to all of our guests for this episode. If you’re enjoying Local Zero, make sure you do subscribe to the pod. Search Local Zero wherever you get your podcasts and click subscribe and please, please do leave us a review. This helps us climb the charts and drive the local energy revolution. If you haven’t already, find and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod to get involved with the discussions there and email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts but for now, thank you and goodbye.
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