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Housing
What landlords should be doing now
From 2027 / 28 the Warm Homes Social Housing Fund and the Warm Homes Local Grant are set to merge into a single scheme with a deliberate shift towards area-based delivery. Retrofit fundamentally works best street by street rather than property by property, because the archetypes repeat and the cost per home falls through economies of scale.
What has to change is the assessment underneath it, as for years a whole-house survey has meant a winter survey, looking at heat loss and little else. The same visit needs to establish how a home behaves in August as well as February, because the measures that fix one can make the other worse if nobody has monitored properly.
This is a problem that isn’ t going away either, as the Met Office has warned that the El Niño developing in the Pacific is likely the strongest in living memory, with 2027 very likely to be the warmest year on record globally. For the UK, the nearer-term signal is a wetter, stormier autumn and winter.
A record dry summer followed by a saturated one, in the same homes, with the same fabric problem behind both.
For most landlords setting stock investment plans for the next five years, it is worth remembering that the survey you commission this year determines what you can do with that money. So, make sure to ask for the summer picture alongside the winter one, and you will only need to invest once. ■
Derek Horrocks, Owner and Chair
Established in 1976, Sustainable Building Services( UK) Ltd is a turnkey solutions provider specialising in retrofit energy efficiency and decarbonisation works. The expert team takes charge of largescale energy efficiency, microgeneration, and planned maintenance programmes for the UK’ s best-known registered social housing providers, all geared towards enhancing the living conditions of thousands of people every year. www. sustainablebuildinguk. com
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