At a time of rising energy costs and growing global price volatility, the organisation warns that without proper testing, retrofit programmes risk widespread installation failures and wasted taxpayer investment.
The publication is aimed at civil servants and policymakers involved in retrofit, as well as housing providers, local authorities and other public bodies responsible for funding, commissioning and assuring retrofit programmes. It supports the Government’s ambition to deliver comfortable, thermally efficient homes for all.
The UK needs to upgrade millions of homes to meet legally binding Net Zero commitments while reducing energy bills, improving comfort, and protecting occupant health.
Yet recent findings from large-scale domestic retrofit schemes have highlighted widespread installation failures, costly remediation and declining public trust. These failures are the consequence of a retrofit process that continues to rely heavily on assumptions, visual inspections and limited oversight, rather than measured evidence of how homes actually perform.
Targeted performance testing protects public investment and ensures retrofit delivers real-world energy savings at a time when households are increasingly exposed to volatile global energy prices. The paper examines the current quality assurance landscape, such as PAS 2035 and BS 40101, and identifies where measurement requirements still fall short.
Testing methodologies before, during and after retrofit work can help the country avoid the installation failures and costly remediation that have plagued previous schemes.
John Taylor, publications manager at BSRIA, said: 'With wholesale gas prices rising sharply in recent weeks, the UK’s reliance on poorly performing homes is once again being exposed. This means ensuring homes are energy efficient is increasingly a cost-of-living issue, in addition to the health and carbon issues.
“The UK has some of the least efficient housing stock in Europe and the failure to address this at scale is leaving the country structurally exposed to global energy price volatility.
“While we welcome the Warm Homes Plan, retrofit continues to suffer from a poor reputation, driven by repeated failures caused by inappropriate specifications and poor-quality workmanship. And, at a time when every pound matters, investment must deliver measured, not assumed, performance.
“Right now, we’re effectively conducting retrofit blind. However, by pairing the Warm Homes Plan with proper testing of airtightness, ventilation and insulation, we can make sure that any investment delivers real-world results.
“Retrofit decisions must be based on evidence-led, property-specific measurement so that outcomes can be verified, energy demand is genuinely reduced, and reliance on turbulent global markets is lowered.
“The recommendations in this whitepaper will help to avoid past mistakes and ensure the Warm Homes Plan is a much-needed success at a time when the consequences of getting this wrong are too significant to ignore.'