What follows are insights from a series of stakeholder engagement workshops conducted In August and September 2025 as part of our Measuring Outcomes + Impact Evaluation (MO+IE) project.
Retrofit programmes can promise a great deal including warmer homes, lower bills, and healthier lives. Yet for many residents, reality doesn’t always match ambition. Through our MO+IE project, the National Retrofit Hub has been exploring this gap between projected outcomes and lived experience, focusing particularly on the health and wellbeing impacts of retrofit.
A Health Check on Retrofit Delivery
When we convened this series of workshops, our intention was to uncover how retrofit might better capture and enhance its impact on residents’ health and wellbeing. We hoped to explore not only what the lived experience of being on the receiving end of retrofit feels like in practice but how homes that are made warmer, drier, and more efficient could translate into measurable health improvements. In principle, the potential is clear: quality retrofit should reduce respiratory illness, ease fuel stress, and improve comfort. Yet what we heard from participants was more sobering. While the sector aspires to these outcomes, many delivery programmes are still struggling to meet even the baseline performance and energy targets in practice. In that context, embedding and monitoring health outcomes remains aspirational rather than immediately achievable.
It became clear that this is not due to a lack of will, but a lack of trust and consistency across the system. Residents often experience retrofit as fragmented, unpredictable, and opaque. Such conditions make it difficult to build the relationships and feedback loops needed to track and improve wellbeing outcomes. Without consistent standards, long-term engagement, and reliable data, health impacts remain anecdotal rather than systematically evidenced. The challenge ahead is to move from intent to integration: designing retrofit programmes that not only deliver improvements to homes but also enable the measurement and realisation of healthier lives.
Bridging the Gap Between Targets and Reality
Workshop discussions with stakeholders representing residents across a range of tenures highlighted a familiar story: the pathway from policy to people’s homes is often uneven.
While energy performance targets are sometimes met on paper, the real-world savings and comfort improvements are sometimes less clear. “Targets are developed around hypothetical scenarios which aren’t a true reflection of reality,” one participant observed.
Residents described a confusing landscape of schemes and eligibility criteria. Many assume that being told they qualify means work will soon begin, only to find themselves navigating multiple assessments and application steps. Others are left uncertain about which measures will actually be installed, or why. Delivery processes can feel fragmented with too many organisations involved, and no single, trusted point of contact.
For households in fuel poverty, the challenge is even more complex. Their energy use patterns differ from the assumptions built into government models, meaning that “typical” energy savings or comfort levels may not apply. As one stakeholder put it, “ventilation often comes last and can be missed. By the end of the process, people just want the contractors out of the house, and it shuts the door on any outstanding crucial work.”
Key Challenges Identified
A consistent theme from the workshop was trust. Many residents lack confidence in the contractors and systems meant to support them. Although the retrofit process is designed to include defined roles, such as a retrofit coordinator, these roles often don’t function effectively in practice.
Participants also flagged complexity and accountability. The retrofit process involves numerous actors, yet there is a lack of clear advocacy for residents. When things go wrong, it too often falls to the homeowner to chase remediation. Funding tends to stop at installation, leaving residents without ongoing support to use or maintain new technologies.
Meanwhile, monitoring and evaluation often rely on data that doesn’t reflect lived realities, particularly when engagement and training have been limited.
Opportunities for Improvement
There is strong agreement on what could make a difference:
- Building trust through community involvement, working with local groups as trusted intermediaries.
- Clarifying delivery processes so residents have clear points of contact.
- Securing long-term funding that supports advice and maintenance beyond installation.
- Improving data and regulation to ensure measurement reflects how people actually live in their homes.
A richer understanding of health impacts is also needed. Links between housing quality, indoor air, and conditions such as asthma are not straightforward cause and effect, they are system effects. Measuring retrofit success must therefore take a whole-system perspective.
Why Broader Outcomes Matter
Retrofit is not only an energy or carbon issue, but also a public health and equity opportunity. Warmer, more comfortable homes reduce fuel poverty, improve wellbeing, and contribute to healthier communities. But to achieve this, retrofit programmes must be designed around people, not just properties.
A Call to the Sector
As the NRH continues this work through MO+IE, we invite policymakers, funders, and delivery partners to join us in rethinking how retrofit outcomes are defined and measured. Together, we can close the gap between targets and reality, ensuring that every retrofit delivers not only on key climate targets, but on health, comfort, and fairness too. We will be holding a “Future Policy Visioning” session later this year.
