Lived experience shapes a better approach to council home retrofit
Lewisham Council has put council tenants at the heart of its major retrofit programme, which is making hundreds of council homes warmer, healthier and more comfortable while reducing energy use and tackling fuel poverty.
Supported by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund (Wave 3), the Council is investing more than £16 million to improve up to 800 council homes. Improvements will include better insulation and ventilation, low-carbon heating and solar panels, helping residents use less energy and stay comfortable all year round.
The programme will prioritise homes that are among the coldest, dampest or most expensive to heat. But the work is about more than improving energy efficiency. It is about improving residents’ quality of life and delivering lasting benefits for communities.
Recognising that retrofit works can be disruptive, we prioritised a year-long engagement process to gain insight from residents going through the works, using their experiences to identify what can be improved and help shape how the programme is delivered in future. We recruited six local residents, paid at the London Living Wage, and trained them as Citizen Scientists.
Over three months, the Citizen Scientists spoke to people who had already experienced retrofit, as well as Council staff, contractors, energy advisers and others involved in delivering the programme. Their research included telephone and face-to-face interviews with residents. Alongside training in ethnographic research methods, they received retrofit training and gained accredited qualifications in fuel poverty (National Energy Action Level 2).
The result is A Neighbour’s Guide to Navigating Retrofit, a new guide made by residents, for residents and published earlier this year.
The Citizen Scientists wanted to understand what having the work done actually means for the people living in them, from repeated surveys and the disruption of building work to the difference that a warmer, more comfortable home can make afterwards.
Importantly, the research captures the difficult experiences as well as the positive ones. Residents spoke about noise, dust, delays and uncertainty, alongside improvements including warmer rooms, better windows and greater comfort.
The Citizen Scientists also found that some residents needed clearer information about new technology in their homes. For example, people who had solar panels installed sometimes found it difficult to understand how they worked or how they were benefiting from them. The research has helped inform the Retrofit Programme’s resident engagement plan, including making the process clearer and helping residents understand installed technology.
As a direct result of the research, the Council has rewritten its resident welcome pack and expanded how Resident Liaison Officers record residents’ needs, including language, health and communication preferences. Managers and Resident Liaison Officers at both of the Council’s retrofit contractors, United Infrastructure and Mulalley, have been trained using the findings.
Passing the knowledge on
The findings have now been brought together in an accessible guide for residents who are going through retrofit or will experience it in future. The guide will be given to every household in the next phase of works.
It explains different types of retrofit work, shares residents’ first-hand experiences and offers practical advice about what people can expect.
The engagement programme was designed and led by Dr Maria Șalaru, the Council’s Retrofit Strategy and Engagement Lead and a Senior Research Fellow in UCL’s Department of Anthropology, drawing on a decade of her research on how residents experience housing retrofit. It was delivered with South East London Community Energy (SELCE), with research support from Dr Șalaru’s ESRC-funded UCL project, Building for Climate Resilience, and two student placements from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Cllr Natalie Thomas, Cabinet Member for Safer Homes, Homelessness and Housing Services, said:
“At the heart of this project is a simple idea: the people who have experienced a service can help make it better for the people who come next. This resident-led research will help us deliver energy-efficient homes in a way that works better for the people living in them.
“Residents should have a meaningful say in how housing services are delivered. This guide turns their first-hand knowledge into practical advice for neighbours and valuable learning for the Council and its partners. By learning directly from residents’ experiences, we can make future retrofit projects clearer, smoother and more supportive.”
Cllr Corin Ashwell, Cabinet Member for Transport, Environment and Climate said:
"Making our council homes more energy-efficient isn’t just good for our climate, it means warmer, healthier and more comfortable homes for our tenants.
“Recent extreme weather has shown why preparing our homes for a changing climate matters. I’m really proud that by 2030, we will have improved up to 800 homes, helping make them more resilient and fit for the future.
“Residents need to be at the heart of how we do this. By learning directly from their experiences, we can keep improving the process as we bring these benefits to hundreds more homes across Lewisham.”
Retrofit means making improvements to an existing home so that it uses less energy. Lewisham’s programme can include improvements such as insulation, new windows and doors, ventilation, heating improvements and solar panels. The Council’s programme is in its third year and has delivered energy-efficiency improvements to more than 250 homes, supported by the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. The next phase is funded through the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund, with £7.1 million from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, matched by £9.1 million from the Council.