“It’s not enough for the Mayor to declare a ‘retrofit revolution,’ issue a press release, and walk away. Londoners need actual follow-through to … make sure our homes are fit for the twenty-first century.”
London’s housing stock is being retrofitted at a tenth of the speed it needs to be.
London’s homes and workplaces are responsible for 68 per cent of the capital’s carbon emissions.
London’s homes are responsible for 72 per cent of London’s energy use.
So when London’s Mayor declared a ‘retrofit revolution’ and campaigned on retrofitting our city in three elections, the City Hall Greens were eager to get to work.
Yet, as his third term begins, the reality of his so-called ‘retrofit revolution’ is stark:
- The Mayor is retrofitting homes more than ten times slower than the rate we need to be moving to hit the Mayor’s 2030 net zero target.
- The Mayor’s Warmer Homes Scheme is upgrading less than 1 per cent of the homes needing to be upgraded each year.
- London doesn’t have enough skilled workers to even use the small amounts of funding that have been made available by Government.
- While the Mayor has a huge budget to devote to upskilling retrofitting, including via his £320 million annual Adult Education Budget, he’s only just over 1.2 per cent is being spent on ‘technical green skills’ education.
So, despite the press releases, it’s clear City Hall still doesn’t have a strategy to change path.
A longtime London renter and property guardian, Zack Polanski knows firsthand exactly how urgent the need for retrofit is across our city. That’s why in his first term as an Assembly Member, Zack published a report entitled ‘London’s ‘Retrofit Revolution’: What’s going wrong?,’ to take stock of the crisis, analyse possible solutions, and provide recommendations for the Mayor to take immediate action.
Essentially, the retrofitting slowdown is stuck in a frustrating cycle:
Londoners need their Mayor to fix our cold homes. Too many of us face a choice between sky-high heating bills or a damp home, and we cannot afford to delay these repairs any longer.
To properly repair the homes, Londoners need a well-trained, skilled workforce ready to step in and get to work.
To properly train that workforce, councils need more funding from London’s Mayor.
But instead of funding the training programs required to produce that skilled workforce, the Mayor keeps funding the repairs themselves, leading to a horrific backlog and labour shortage.
Keeping that reality in mind, the primary recommendations from Zack’s September 2023 report are:
The Mayor and London Partnership Board should urgently assess the recent failure to deliver existing retrofit funding from the Government, through councils and the GLA, and share their findings.
The Mayor should work with the London Partnership Board retrofit sub-group to publish a GLA retrofit strategy, with actions the GLA specifically can make across training provision, procurement, and elsewhere.
Immediately following his report’s publication, the Mayor instructed the Greater London Authority (GLA) to fund Zack’s recommended Retrofit Coordination training for local councils via a private training provider. While this might seem like more bureaucracy, funding that training is the first step to getting our leaky homes safe and ready for the climate crisis.
London City Hall Greens 