Decarbonising the Social Housing Stock: A Retrofit Route Map

Baker-Brown is project lead for a study into low energy retrofit best practice for the Greater Brighton Economic Board which is a group of seven local authorities in SE England. This project will last for a year and consider best practice retrofit strategies (for eight different social housing types), starting with how to use current maintenance funds to achieve ‘EPC C’ and then cost-effective consideration for meeting LETI Best Practice and Exemplar benchmarks. Also, included in the study is a comparison of seven different energy standards from ‘SAP’ and ‘EnergyPlus’, to PHPP and ‘IES’. We are also mapping the carbon footprint of material flows off and onto retrofit sites, the opportunities for specifying local, organic, non-toxic materials, together with the training and employment opportunities large- scale retrofit presents, and of course the huge issue of fuel poverty.