The Democratic Vacuum in Retrofit

When Donald Trump returned to the White House, he did not waste time lifting the drawbridge. Rules on oversight, routes of removal, the checks that stop incumbents hoarding power, all pared back. A democracy with one door bolted shut is no democracy at all.

The same danger is creeping into retrofit.

Last week in Parliament, the Better Planning Coalition warned MPs that the English Devolution Bill risks creating mayoral super-powers without the London-style accountability that makes them tolerable. Climate and nature duties are missing. Public participation rights are being stripped out. And the witnesses said it plainly: without checks and balances, you get a democratic deficit.

Retrofit is already living that deficit.

• MCS is meant to safeguard technical standards.
• TrustMark is meant to assure quality.
• PAS 2035 is meant to embed whole-house principles.

But ask any householder, and the line of accountability is invisible. Accreditation is patchy. Oversight bodies are underfunded. Retrofit policy is still governed by stop-start funding schemes that collapse faster than they build trust.

The forest is burning, but incumbents are digging in, wedging themselves into governance seats and holding tight, while citizens are left outside the walls.

Insulate Against The ‘Greenlash’

First let’s establish the facts. Widespread disgust is going to erupt now the full scale of the ‘bad actors’ in insulation have been called out by government. Low quality, sub par insulation work, paid for by the public purse is bad news. It’s bad news for the efforts of good

Refurb and Retrofit MagazineMatthew Forbes Milloy

This is how you lose a public mandate.

Communities shut out from examinations of spatial plans. Homeowners unable to challenge poor installs. Installers tripped up by arbitrary accreditation hurdles. It is democracy without the means of removal, a system run for incumbents, not for people.

We know where that road leads: disempowerment, disillusion, backlash. In the US it delivered Trumpism.

In retrofit it could deliver stagnation at the very moment we need acceleration.

The lesson from planning is clear: power without accountability is brittle. Unless retrofit regulation grows a democratic spine - clear duties, funded regulators, guaranteed citizen rights - this government will score an own goal on the green agenda.

Just look at policing in the UK - it's done with consent. Lose consent, mask them up, get them abducting everyone - and you risk insurrection.

Retrofit is obsessed with benchmarks, targets and performance. But if people, the human beings who live in those buildings and in this society don't feel like the system is working for them, you lose them.