Strengthening resident engagement around retrofit through our Resident Engagement Toolkit
Warmer Homes London is committed to ensuring high-quality resident experiences are at the heart of making London’s homes energy efficient.
To help make this ambition a reality, our Social Housing Fund Strategic Partnership delivery team has been working on a Resident First Retrofit Toolkit. This toolkit, developed in partnership with the Young Foundation, contains resources and case studies drawn from real experiences delivering across London.
To embed resident voices, a Resident Advisory Group was formed: a group of twenty Londoners who over 6 months unpacked their own experiences of retrofit. We’re thankful for the group’s input, and for their positive feedback about their experience:
- “Being part of this project made me feel useful and empowered, and it was amazing to meet like-minded people and bring some kindness to a really technical process. The way things were explained mattered a lot to me. For example, describing insulation as being like a ‘woolly jumper’ for my home really helped me understand it.”
- "I really appreciated being able to help develop feasible solutions through these tools. It made me feel very empowered, especially since past work I’ve had done didn’t give me that feeling. The project gave a really holistic view, showing how jobs are being created and offering hope that people in the future can have a positive experience of these improvements."
This month, the toolkit was previewed to our Strategic Partnership members, including Resident Engagement Officers across London. The toolkit will be rolled out with a sample cohort of programme partners, so we can robustly test whether the resources meet the needs of those delivering resident engagement. The toolkit will then be rolled out throughout the Strategic Partnership in January, ahead of public access later in the year.
The Social Housing Fund Strategic Partnership, which is England’s largest by size of grant, includes 21 boroughs and 6 social housing providers. This month, alongside previewing the toolkit, the team rolled out a new post-retrofit resident survey.
This survey is a compulsory part of grant reporting to DESNZ: by collecting this data through the collective Strategic Partnership, we are beginning to build a picture of resident experiences across London. Connecting this insight to data held on retrofit measures and building types allows us to create pan-London case studies, and shorten the feedback loop around what works — all moving us towards more energy-efficient homes for Londoners, faster and more effectively.
