Collaboration of the year: Greater London

Transform-ER (Transform. Engage. Retrofit) brings together 13 organisations from across housing, manufacturing, technology, construction, research and local government to tackle one of the UK’s biggest net zero challenges: scaling high-quality home retrofit quickly, affordably and effectively.

 

The project was convened through Innovate UK’s Net Zero Heat: Design Engineering Innovation Lab. What unites the partners is a shared diagnosis: retrofit is struggling not because of technological shortcomings, but because of fragmented delivery models, poor data and weak collaboration.

 

Together the partners have secured £3.2m in funding to design a fundamentally new retrofit model that tackles these issues. More than technical solutions, the model also addresses the cultural and structural barriers to enabling retrofit at the necessary scale.

 

The consortium has co-developed a suite of integrated solutions, including AI-enabled housing data platforms, drone-assisted surveying, interoperable retrofit systems, collaborative commercial models and resident-first engagement approaches.

 

Its first demonstrator project in the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham delivered a whole-home retrofit in just four weeks, halving previous costs while bringing the property up from an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Band D rating to EPC Band A.