Thinking across portfolio will be vital to meeting retrofit, housing, and net zero targets
In the second of our ‘Joining the Dots’ series exploring the interconnected nature of policy agendas for Scotland’s built environment, Jocelyne Fleming, Senior Policy & Public Affairs Officer – Scotland at the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB), discusses how siloed approaches to policy hinder progress on Scotland’s housing, retrofit, and net zero goals.
Scotland cannot solve its housing, net zero or Just Transition goals without holistic, cross-portfolio policymaking.
Throughout our advocacy efforts, the CIOB has continued to assert Scotland will struggle to tackle the housing emergency in the absence of a long-term, strategic approach to meeting our housing challenges.
We know Scotland needs to increase its housing supply, and, as the Scottish Government has recognised, we need to retrofit our existing homes at pace and scale to ensure everyone has a home that is safe, affordable, and meets their needs. What’s more, we won’t achieve net zero targets unless we ensure that both new and existing housing is energy efficient and fit for purpose now and into the future.
Getting these homes built, repaired, and improved to a high degree of quality, which achieves in situ the efficiency levels required, will not happen without a robust pipeline of skilled, qualified people to undertake the work. To recruit and train the necessary workforce to deliver high-quality housing, the industry needs clarity, stability, and increased resources.
Therefore, facilitating widescale housing construction and retrofit will require long-term thinking from policymakers and a commitment to adopting a strategic approach that makes the most of public resources by ensuring funds are used effectively. This is a particularly acute issue when it comes to retrofit.
That’s why the current short-term, siloed approach to wide-sweeping policy and social problems remains frustrating. For example, while supportive of the Government’s necessarily ambitious aims to decarbonise the built environment, the CIOB previously raised concerns about the approach proposed in the initial Heat in Buildings Strategy and the potential for its proposals to worsen rates of fuel poverty, a view now shared by the Scottish Government. The initial legislation was arguably reflective of short-term, siloed thinking. This approach to policymaking is inefficient; it wastes both time and money.
The CIOB has argued, as have others, that retrofit projects can support many policy and social objectives; they can support the economy, in particular creating local jobs, and are an example of a socially valuable project.
However, these economic and social benefits will be put at risk if the challenges of retrofit and decarbonisation are not considered holistically and with a cross-portfolio approach to identifying and supplying the resources needed to meet these challenges.
For example, the by-tenure, piecemeal model for retrofit funding loses out on economies of scale, which makes the per-unit price to renovate homes higher than it needs to be. If a cross-tenure, neighbourhood-wide model was adopted for retrofit, these costs could be reduced with materials and sites shared. This model also presents wider benefits for local jobs and can help address the skills gap, as larger-scale, longer-term projects would facilitate the training and retention of local skilled workers.
The CIOB is, in principle, supportive of the ambitions behind aims outlined in legislation like the Heat in Buildings Strategy and Social Housing Net Zero Standard. However, these by-tenure standards, which arguably fail to adequately consider the full breadth of Scotland’s housing challenges and barriers to the widescale uptake of retrofit projects, may have unintended consequences, in particular for vulnerable households.
Significant reforms are needed to the way Scotland approaches retrofit if we are ever going to reach our goals for housing and decarbonisation while ensuring a Just Transition. All tenures must be considered together when developing our approach to retrofit. It is equally vital policymakers engage with non-housing departments— like Further and Higher Education, Climate Action, and Public Finance— that directly influence the nation’s ability to tackle its housing challenges.
That’s why the CIOB, alongside industry partners, continues to call for the development of a national Retrofit Delivery and Resource Plan, which takes a cross-tenure, neighbourhood-based approach and considers how we will adequately resource these projects— both financially and with a sufficient pipeline of the right people with the right skills. We have further suggested such a plan should be overseen by a Ministerial Oversight Group on Retrofit, which brings together the relevant ministers, civil servants, and wider stakeholder groups needed to meet Scotland’s retrofit challenge.
There are positive steps in this space, but we need declarative, urgent action and leadership from the Scottish Government to bring together the relevant people and portfolios to set to work on an ambitious national strategy for housing and retrofit. It will be a long road ahead, and careful consideration and extensive consultation will be necessary to avoid unintended consequences.
Nonetheless, I remain optimistic about the collaborative landscape across Scotland’s construction industry, its housing sector, and at Holyrood.
Jocelyne Fleming is the Senior Policy & Public Affairs Officer for Scotland at the Chartered Institute of Building. She leads the organisation’s work advocating in the public interest on all issues relating to the built environment and construction in Scotland. Jocelyne is also undertaking a PhD in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow.
This blog is part of BEFS ‘Joining the Dots’ series exploring interconnected policy areas. See the first blog for an introduction to the series.
Get in touch – to find out more about BEFS work or to discuss a particular topic or policy area email us at info@befs.org.uk or contact the Team.
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