The UK needs to retrofit over one million homes per year by 2030 to meet its net-zero target, but the current market lacks the capacity and coordination to do this at scale. This project, Transform-ER, tackles the systemic barriers that prevent rapid, high-quality home retrofits. The problem is not a lack of technology, but a fragmented industry: poor data on housing stock, incompatible products, slow accreditation, and contracts that discourage collaboration. Without a new approach, the UK will fail to upgrade its existing housing stock—most of which will still be standing in 2050—to meet legal climate obligations. If successful, Transform-ER will create a standardised "Retrofit Rulebook" and a shared data platform that lets builders, product manufacturers, and financiers work from the same playbook. It will introduce a contracting model—based on the Heathrow Terminal 5 approach—that rewards collaboration over cost-cutting. A new Community Interest Company will act as a fair market vehicle, while a product database and procurement platform will open routes to market for verified solutions. The result would be a retrofit system capable of delivering one million homes per year, with reduced risk, faster timelines, and lower costs—transforming a fragmented cottage industry into a coordinated, manufacturing-led sector.
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"Transform-ER" (Transform. Engage. Retrofit) brings together an experienced and diverse consortium to tackle multiple barriers to retrofitting homes. The vast majority of the UK's existing housing stock will still be present by 2050 and therefore must comply with Net Zero 2050 legislative objectives. The current retrofit market in the UK has insufficient depth of capacity and breadth of capability to satisfy the need of retrofitting over 1 million homes per year, to achieve this. Hence a transformational approach is required, which will leverage the best aggregated learning from multiple, key stakeholder representatives (the consortia), a plethora of prior projects, and an enhanced level of coordination and structure. In tandem, Transform-ER will embrace the migration towards offsite construction, the adoption of Modern Methods and take the best learning from other manufacturing-led sectors to apply to the retrofit market. The project will realise systemic change to enable rapid deployment of high quality retrofit solutions, targeting delivery of 1m homes per year by 2030\. Transform-ER adopts the Product Platform Rulebook's 'Demand, Develop, Deploy' structure to envisage our future retrofit system. Efforts across each of these work packages will come together, creating the following benefits: * Better data on portfolios and projects, reducing risk and enabling visibility of pipelines * Clear interoperability rules for new products, enabling kits of parts to be brought together * Routes to market for existing and new verified solutions, with a streamlined and simplified accreditation route * A product database and procurement platform, which uses data to create a competitive market place for offsite products alongside traditional * A new approach to contracting for delivery, based on the Heathrow Terminal 5 model, which incentivises collaboration to achieve completion on time and to budget, through innovative profit structure. * A culture change programme which enables organisations to adopt a more collaborative approach. * A finance and insurance supported vehicle for delivery of retrofit. All of the new approaches will be underpinned by an end-to-end data platform, enabled by a set of guidelines to enhance the structure, control and consistency of retrofit delivery, in association with a fair and equitable market vehicle - a Community Interest Company. A Retrofit Rulebook will be developed which will write up the activities in the project as case studies, and set out clear guidance for other industry actors, and those wishing to join the retrofit revolution.
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