This piece of work, led jointly by GLA and London Councils, reviews London's current approach to retrofitting social and leasehold homes.
The report makes recommendations for how we can make the funding, policy and delivery system in London work more effectively to meet our fuel poverty and carbon reduction goals.
The key findings include:
• London's social landlords are operating in an increasingly challenging context. Without changes to the way we fund social housing and retrofit programmes it will be difficult to meet our retrofit goals.
• The policy and funding landscape for retrofit has led to fragmentation which in turn has created barriers to delivery, including an underdeveloped supply chain, a lack of data for planning, and reduced subsidy for London.
• London has a some valuable support and enabling services, including Retrofit London and the GLA's Net Zero Accelerators. It has strong examples of innovation, knowledge transfer, data and delivery.
• There are some strategic functions that could be strengthened to support social landlords to deliver and to facilitate collaboration to make better use of London's size and scale. This includes strategy, funding and finance, supply chains, data and knowledge transfer.
• London could benefit from a London Office for Retrofit, bringing together and enhancing existing support. This would help provide:
• A clear strategy and visible pipeline that would permit coordination and planning.
• Identification of significant funding streams, ideally underpinned by a single settlement for London that allowed the capital to meet its own needs and develop mechanisms to attract private finance.
• Improvements in the supply chain, supported by clearer signalling of the citywide pipeline and support with skills planning.
• Improved data consistency to reduce disparities between modelling and reality at programme level and improve spatial planning at a strategic level.
During the next phase GLA and London Councils will be working together to explore organisational design options to help us make use of existing funding and resources to strengthen retrofit support, and where it may be beneficial to build additional capability.
We will be drawing on expert input from partners and our London government professional networks to help strengthen this work.