Becky Lane: "In 2050, every home in the UK will be as energy efficient as possible"

Becky Lane is the co-founder and CEO of Furbnow – a Birmingham-based startup helping homeowners to easily navigate the process of retrofitting and improving their homes' energy efficiency. She is also a Board Member at the Sustainable Housing Action Partnership – a not-for-profit organisation “promoting best practice on the environmental, social and economic aspects of sustainable housing.”

She very kindly agreed to be my first guest for this series. 

Becky and I chatted about a range of topics: from ways homeowners can minimise the disruption of retrofitting to why it's important we develop the ‘able-to-pay’ market. 

Below is a round up of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity. 

Becky, you predict that “by 2050, every home in the UK will be as energy efficient as possible." Let’s delve into that. What does it mean for a home to be energy efficient?

Honestly, it can mean a lot of things to different people, depending on what they’re trying to sell you. Really though, it’s just the home using as little energy as possible to produce a desired outcome. That could be in terms of appliances but normally it tends to be around the heating aspects. So the least amount of kWh – whether that’s gas or another fuel – needed to heat the home to a comfortable temperature. There’s a lot of debate around what a comfortable temperature is but every Energy Performance Certificate uses a two-zone model. They assume that the living space is heated to 21 degrees and the rest of the house is heated to 18 degrees. The energy efficiency of a house is whatever kWh is required to achieve those outcomes. 

Do you think every home is capable of reaching EPC band A?

I don’t. I live in an Edwardian terrace house. The maximum EPC band I can get to, for instance, is a high C. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to get my home to the same level as a house that was built in the 1970s. Rather than outcomes like band A or a certain kWh/m², at Furbnow, we’re just focused on getting people started on a pathway to improvements.

Any idea what that pathway might look like?

Retrofitting will happen in stages. I don’t think it will happen all in one go because it’s expensive. It’s likely people will make incremental changes, over the next 27 or so years. 

Which changes would you recommend people start with first?

From a what’s best perspective, it would be to insulate your house properly and make sure the ventilation is there so you’re not causing any potential damp, mould or condensation issues. But, realistically, what’s probably going to happen is more people pick the less disruptive measures first, like installing solar panels.

Where I think the retrofit industry gets stuck is they want people to go down the ideal route when, in reality, we’ve also got to be led by what people are willing to do. And that’s still a great start. 

You mentioned disruption there. Do you think some degree of disruption is always inevitable when it comes to retrofitting?

The average homeowner lives in their home for over ten years and their house needs to adapt as their needs change. You could go through a whole family cycle within 10-20 years.

So, at Furbnow, we create a whole house plan to start with and then help people with projects when they’re ready. We can meet people at that time when they’re already doing something disruptive, like redecorating or building an extension. 

Very interesting. Zooming out for a second, are you happy with the rate at which we’re currently retrofitting homes?

If I’m honest, not really. If we look at where most of the market activity is right now, it tends to be in the grant sectors. More and more grant funding has been announced over the last few years. But large swathes of that never gets spent. It goes back to the Treasury, at the end of the year. I know from people I’ve worked with that it can be as high as 98% that’s returned.  

I had no idea. Why do you think that figure is so high, in certain cases?

I’d say it’s a few things:

1. A complete lack of investment from central government in a national retrofit campaign. There needs to be a long-term, consistent communications programme, like there is for the Smart Metering Programme, so that people know the money is available. 
2. Grant programmes aren’t run very efficiently, mainly because they’re done on quite short timescales. It takes quite a long time for a local authority to get the skills in place to manage them. But also to build a relationship with communities and the retrofit sector.  

What effect does that have on retrofit companies, like solar panel installers and retrofit assessors?

A lot of them are small businesses. From a cash flow perspective, with grant funding, there’s a massive spike at certain points of the year and a drought for the rest of the year. Having enough resources to fill the flood points and survive the drought periods is very difficult. 

It sounds like unreliable grant funding could be slowing down the growth of the retrofit supply chain. Do you think anything can be done about that?

If we’re assuming that every home needs £30,000 of investment to get it to the stage it needs to be by 2050 and there are 14 million homes not eligible for grant funds, that’s a £420 billion ‘able-to-pay’ market. 

While grant programmes boom and bust, companies like ours can be outside of the typical grant cycle and help suppliers with cashflow. If suppliers can see a route to growth in the market, they can invest in apprentices and training & employing more people. In the long run, it would also help to reduce the prices that homeowners pay as well.

On the topic of training, at the end of last year, the government announced “almost 9,000 training courses will be run across England for heat pump and energy efficiency installers.” What are your thoughts on that?

I think training is great. But we’ve also got to attract people into the career. 

If you’re 16 and you’re surrounded by people in the trades, why wouldn’t you become an electrician or a plumber or a general builder? Why would you become an installation specialist unless there’s something that demonstrates to you that it’s going to be worth your while?

People need to be able to see a career path. 

It makes sense. Finally, aside from that, do you think anything else could be done to grow the market?

If one thing were to happen that would throw a bomb into getting this market going, it would be policy requirements for different housing tenures. It’s kind of already there in minimum energy efficiency standards – so setting the lowest barrier for what needs to happen for different tenures. For social housing, the requirement is EPC C by 2030. That’s created a clear requirement for those in charge of looking after those buildings – assets, as they’ll call them – to invest in them.

People will invest in retrofitting if it makes sense to them. If it makes sense from a house price perspective, then I think even more people will consider it. We could have the same sort of policy driver that you couldn’t sell your house, or you’d have a stamp duty hike, if you didn’t hit a certain EPC band. 

There are loads of ways you could structure the policy but it would add retrofit to the mix of renovation and get people to seriously think about how it could improve the value of their home. That would be a massive catalyst for demand.

That’s such an interesting point. Becky, we’ve covered a lot there and you’ve provided some incredible insights. Thanks again for your time. It’s been lovely to chat.



Readers – it’s now over to you. How do you think we can make every home in the UK as energy efficient as possible by 2050? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.