In advance of the Summit, Eleanor Purser, Interim Director of Warmer Homes London, shares her perspective on how London can collectively tackle the city’s residential retrofit challenges through collaboration, data, and coordinated investment.

Warmer Homes London is a new partnership between the Mayor of London and London Councils, jointly governed by both, in partnership with London boroughs and housing associations. 

We know that improving the energy efficiency of residential buildings is so much more than just making changes to the four walls that people live within. At its core, it's about working to ensure that everyone has the right to live in a healthier, greener, and more comfortable home. Retrofit delivered successfully is a powerful mechanism to tackle economic and health inequalities, while also creating important local job opportunities. 

London's homes are some of the oldest and least energy efficient in Europe, and 10% of Londoners are in fuel poverty. Yet as a capital, despite previous best individual efforts by social landlords and forward-looking private landlords, we trail behind others at the pace and effectiveness needed to deliver at our required levels. 

This is why Warmer Homes London was created. We are a partnership between the Mayor of London and London Councils designed to collectively tackle the currently fragmented and uncoordinated approach to residential retrofit delivery in London. 

Firstly we will increase the impact of a £231m retrofit investment pipeline, made up of £121m of government funding, and over £110m from the Mayor, boroughs and housing associations. 

Warmer Homes London manages England’s largest Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund strategic partnership, which includes 21 boroughs and 6 housing associations. In due course we will assume programme management responsibility for the 31 borough Warm Homes: Local Grant consortium, being incubated by the GLA. Bringing both grant programmes under one roof gives us an active opportunity to collaborate on tackling challenges and scaling what works. 

Following the launch of our delivery plan in July, we've been working together with our delivery partners to lay the foundations for achieving our collective goals. Our 5 strategic pillars are: 

Strategically coordinating our pipeline, building towards resident focused, area-based delivery. 

Improving access to flexible and predictable funding, to invest in retrofit for London. 

Leveraging city wide data to generate insights that drive effective and value for money retrofit. 

Helping to support our supply chain by using our funded programmes to develop opportunities for local supply chain growth. 

Strengthening our capabilities as a city by identifying the right capacity support at the point it’s most needed and addressing local delivery barriers. 

The first of our collaborative tools are being rolled out to our partners this winter. This includes a cost information dashboard for our SHF partnership, which uses actual project delivery data to provide greater transparency across the supply chain, and a toolkit that allows us to measure and track resident satisfaction. 

We are also working in collaboration with LOTI to take forward insights from their damp and mould sensors project, by bringing in smart meter consumption data held in the GLA-led London Building Stock Model (LBSM). Drawing on additional data from our partnerships, we can create archetypes and measurable evidence that enable our delivery partners to target those most in need. 

Warmer Homes London shows London's readiness to forge bold new partnerships at a time when there is fresh impetus to remove the barriers which hold back quality delivery at scale. We are consciously adopting a test, learn and scale methodology by working with our delivery partners in our grant programmes to shorten the feedback loop. This allows us to move beyond isolated efforts by identifying effective and adoptable approaches, and scaling those across the city. 

With our partners’ support, data on real-time programmatic delivery and forecasts we can create compelling cases for change across the delivery eco-system. But we can’t do it alone. Only by creatively working together can we make London’s homes greener, healthier, and more affordable for all.