Local leadership is the key missing ingredient in the UK’s retrofit revolution

The city’s retrofit service, YorEnergy, offers a glimpse of what this could look like if adopted by other sub-national and local areas across the country. It functions as a locally led, one-stop shop designed to turn national ambition into practical, trusted delivery.

Previous UK schemes have relied on an atomised market where households must co-ordinate individual trades, seek finance alone and carry most of the risk. YorEnergy deliberately flips the model.

Its design borrows from the business-model literature, which breaks delivery into key components: value proposition, supply chain, customer interface, finance and governance. By rethinking each component locally, YorEnergy addresses the barriers that have long stalled retrofits across the UK.

“Households don’t wake up wanting ‘a fabric-first package’ or ‘a heat-loss reduction strategy’. They want warmer, healthier homes that fit their lives and budgets”

Start with the value proposition. Households don’t wake up wanting “a fabric-first package” or “a heat-loss reduction strategy”. They want warmer, healthier homes that fit their lives and budgets.

YorEnergy reframes retrofit as a complete home improvement service, one that weighs energy savings alongside comfort, damp risks, heritage constraints, childcare schedules and the quirks of York’s housing stock, which ranges from Victorian terraces to rural cottages. This tailored approach builds credibility early in the journey and reduces the high dropout rates that national schemes typically see at the advice stage.

The supply chain is another persistent failure point. National programmes generate boom-and-bust cycles that overwhelm thin local capacity. YorEnergy instead curates a network of vetted contractors, provides project management and ensures predictable quality assurance. The aim isn’t centralisation but stability, which is essential for multi-measure, whole-home upgrades.

The customer interface is treated as a relationship that sees households working with a named advisor from first enquiry to aftercare. Civic co-branding with the City of York signals trust in a market where quality is hard to verify. Local touchpoints in places like libraries, newsletters and community events make engagement simple and familiar.

On finance, YorEnergy acts as an interpreter of grants, loans and staged plans. By matching options to local incomes and tenure types, and partnering with credit unions and other organisations, it widens participation without promising instruments the market cannot yet support.

But it is governance that binds this model together, and it is governance that SEI identifies as the missing link in national policy. YorEnergy convenes suppliers, community groups and council departments, allowing the system to flex when projects encounter planning delays, contractor shortages or shifting national rules.

It also embeds an equity lens: by monitoring who accesses the service and where people drop out, the team can respond with translated materials, evening clinics or landlord engagement. This prevents drift towards only “easy-to-treat” homes and ensures that vulnerable groups, such as those facing soaring energy bills and fuel poverty, are not left behind.

“YorEnergy convenes suppliers, community groups and council departments, allowing the system to flex when projects encounter planning delays, contractor shortages or shifting national rules”

This local model also redefines how we judge success. Counting installations is insufficient. What matters is capture – that is, who is reached, who progresses, who completes and who returns. Blending data with advisor insight reveals friction points so the service can adjust in real time, which is something national schemes can rarely achieve.

None of this suggests abandoning national policy. On the contrary, the research points to a national-local settlement. Central government must provide stable, long-term finance, clear technical and consumer-protection standards and interoperable data templates. But it is local one-stop shops that turn policy into practice.

The lesson from York is clear. If the UK is serious about tackling the energy inefficiency of its homes, and protecting households facing punishing energy costs, it must stop relying on generic, top-down programmes and start empowering locally led delivery.

Retrofit is not merely a technical upgrade; it is a civic service. And like all good public services, it works best when shaped by the places and people it is meant to serve.

Luke Gooding, research associate, Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York