Our Story

Home Group is a Housing Association, social enterprise, and charity with a turnover of £420m and one of the UK’s largest providers of high-quality housing and integrated housing, health and social care. Founded in 1935, Home Group has grown into an organisation which houses over 120,000 people in 55,000 homes across England and Scotland.

Home Group are committed to doing the right thing for their customers, communities, and the planet. In doing so, Home Group are acting on decarbonising four key areas: new and existing homes, offices and operations. This case study explores Home Group’s existing homes and supply chains.

The Challenge

The Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) project is the first of its kind to be completed by Home Group. Home Group looked at targeting 90 of their lowest performing off-gas properties in rural Cumbria to complete a whole house retrofit following a fabric first, low carbon technology approach. With the nature of this project, there has been many challenges and learnings faced along the way.

Before the project took place, resident engagement was a challenge. Reasons for this included access to lower cost fuels, not wanting the upheaval of works, not wanting change, concerns about air source heat pumps and little understanding of what these projects would involve and how it would benefit customers. Additionally, there have been many challenges surrounding large scale retrofit works being carried out in Cumbria including local supply chain to complete PAS2030/35 works and ability to target rural, pepper potted housing stock.

The Solution

Working in partnership with Home Group, Pro-Cast, a contractor with values built on honesty, safety and responsibility. With previous experience in delivering full house retrofit projects in rural locations across Scotland, Pro-Cast has been paramount to the success of the project through their wealth of knowledge delivering a high standard of works across all properties. At a time where there is so much worry with the cost of living and energy crisis, being able to deliver homes of high quality, low running costs and fit for the future is something to really be proud of. This mutual view of both Home Group and Pro-Cast has allowed us to work closely together to achieve an end result of residents who are proud of where they live and are in better financial situation.

One happy resident noted that their energy bills have decreased from £7 a day to 70p a day.

One reason for the success of this project has been the resident engagement strategy. This included resident engagement days, show homes and contracts onsite, surveys, information booklets, meetings with contractors, manufactures and energy advisers. As a result, there has been excellent customer buy-in with the Home Group and Pro-Cast on track to deliver retrofit to 100% of homes funding was applied for.

The SHDF Wave 1 project has also exceeded funding requirements. One bungalow has gone from an EPC of 58D to 94A seeing a total estimated energy use decrease from 10,888kWh/yr to 5,564kWh/yr. This reduction (nearly half) does not take into consideration the further energy savings the resident will expect to see through the solar panels and battery. This is providing warmer, better internal air quality and affordable to run homes and a better quality of life.

Due to exceeding PAS2035 requirements, both the Retrofit Coordinator and Home Group have been awarded ‘Retrofit Coordinator of the Year 2023’ through the retrofit academy and ‘North East Landlord of the Year 2023’ through the Energy Efficiency Awards.

This project has not just focused on completing the works to achieve funding and government statistical targets, it has really focused on education and bringing the residents on the journey to net zero. SHDF Wave 1 is a fantastic example of what good practice is and what you can achieve from a group of likeminded people wanting to achieve something better for local communities and the industry.

Read more here.