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On the 7th July, the New Economics Foundation published its proposed green recovery package for housing, which was co-authored by RW Member Parity Projects and with Donal Brown of the University of Leeds.

To deliver minimum SAP C by 2030 for homes in the UK, the New Economics Foundation identified a package of measures that would cost the taxpayer £8.66bn for four years, to:

• unlock a cumulative total of around £71.95bn of private capital investment
• deliver 1.58% higher annual GDP (or £36.34 billion in 2020 prices) than otherwise expected in 2023/24
• deliver deep retrofits to 8.69m UK homes
• save an average £418 on the energy bills for those homes
• create 117,811 new direct jobs in year one, rising to 382,885, in year four
• create 515,157 jobs when factoring in indirect employment
• save an estimated £0.42 for the NHS for every £1 spent retrofitting fuel-poor homes
• reduce emissions by approximately 19.23MtCO2/year by 2023/24, or 21% of 2019 emissions from the UK’s homes.
• This is a cumulative 40.9 MtCO2 by 2023/24, meaning this policy proposal alone could surpass the UK’s fourth carbon budget targets.

The Government’s Summer Budget fell short of this proposed stimulus, but equally it only covered £3billion of the £9.2 billion manifesto commitment.

RetrofitWorks has worked incredibly hard since its formation to provide the ‘bottom-up’ model to allow every part of the UK, every part of the economy, every person coming through the education system to spot their place in the team and to pull together to work towards such challenging targets. These are huge challenges, but not impossible to acheive provided we all work together to do so.