Council Retrofit Inertia: Is UKREiiF The Answer?
Retrofit inertia comes not from apathy – it’s created by capacity, cashflow and competency shortfalls. With UKREiiF fast approaching can we kick start spending?
Retrofit inertia comes not from apathy – it’s created by capacity, cashflow and competency shortfalls.
Last weekend’s Guardian exposé revealed that London boroughs are sitting on more than £130 million of unspent carbon-offset money, with most having deployed under 20 % of the cash they have collected since 2016 ('London councils yet to spend £130m in local climate funds').
Sam Gelder
Cue predictable finger-wagging: “Councils just don’t care enough.” That reading is too neat – and dangerously wrong. Three structural bottlenecks are throttling retrofit delivery, and we’ve been tracking all of them in these pages.
1 | Planning teams are drowning
Planning departments were gutted by a decade of austerity; today many have fewer chartered planners than they have major schemes in the inbox.
When resources are this thin, elected members inevitably chase headline-grabbing “flagship” green commissions – the glossy new net-zero civic building, the electric-bus interchange – because they photograph well and hit single-project carbon metrics.
Meanwhile retrofit, with its myriad small interventions, slips to the bottom of the pile. As we argued in January, “the actual lived experience of fraught planning departments… means targeting flagship, carbon-zero-hitting targets will work for now but is kicking future problems into the long grass” (Flagship Carbon Zero Projects Are Counter Productive).
Matthew Forbes Milloy
2 | Half the sector is fighting off bankruptcy
Retrofit capital budgets sit inside the same council ledger that pays for social care, SEND provision and street-lighting.
The National Audit Office warns that 43 % of English authorities could be forced to issue a Section 114 effective-bankruptcy notice unless the funding model is overhauled before 2026 (Almost half of England’s councils ‘could face bankruptcy over £4.6bn deficit’).
Richard Partington
When the finance director is trying to keep the bins collected, the political appetite for multi-year retrofit programmes evaporates – even when ring-fenced funds exist – because committing that spend today may trigger an insolvency tomorrow.
3 | Retrofit literacy is patchy – but help is coming
The technology stack has raced ahead of institutional know-how. Many councils still don’t have an in-house retrofit champion who can translate PAS 2035, SHF wave-3 rules and whole-life-carbon calculators into a deliverable business case.
The UKREiiF conference in Leeds next month is promising more than 60 stages and 275 councils in the room – with retrofit skills and finance masterclasses threaded through the programme. That’s a start, but until every authority has core retrofit competence, capital pots will continue to gather dust.
So what now?
Blaming councils for sitting on cash is cathartic but pointless. The real cure is boring, system-wide reform:
- Resource planning teams properly – or ring-fence retrofit staff who are insulated from the next shiny megaproject.
- Stabilise local-government finance so Section 114 isn’t perpetually around the corner. Certainty unlocks spend.
- Embed retrofit literacy – one qualified retrofit professional in every borough, backed by a funded national knowledge hub, not a one-off conference session.
The prize is golden: warmer homes, lower bills, and a city-wide emissions haircut delivered faster than any flagship showcase can manage.
The money is there; the need is urgent. What’s missing is the empowered people in town halls who can connect the two.
We don’t need more pilots – we need more pilots in the cockpit.
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