New Green Retrofit Report asks Mayor: What happened to the ‘Retrofit Revolution’ you promised?

The Mayor has taken alarmingly little action to retrofit London’s buildings, a new report from Zack Polanski AM shows.

Despite campaigning on the issue for two elections, and declaring a ‘retrofit revolution’ in 2021, London is still upgrading its leaky housing stock at incredibly slow rate and doesn’t have enough skilled workers to even use the small amounts of funding that have been made available by Government – meanwhile, City Hall still doesn’t have a strategy to change path.

Key findings from the report include:

• London is retrofitting its homes over ten times slower than the rate we need to be moving to hit the Mayor’s 2030 net zero target, meanwhile the Mayor’s Warmer Homes Scheme is upgrading less than 1 per cent of the homes needing to be upgraded each year. [4]
• London councils and the GLA have failed to use even the limited sums of money already made available by Government. For instance, councils could only spend 5 per cent of funding from the Government’ flagship Social Housing Decarbonisation Scheme by the initial deadline, with two-thirds of boroughs failing to install a single measure in that time.
• Experts, campaigners, industry professionals and the GLA itself have identified skills shortages as a key issue behind the underspend – an area that the Mayor has huge control of, including via his £320 million per year Adult Education Budget.
• The Mayor has failed to develop and fund specialist retrofit training courses, nor ensure retrofit is incorporated into all construction training – leaving London’s supply chain underdeveloped, under-delivering, and completely ill-equipped for an uptick in investment
• In the Mayor’s Adult Education Budget, just over 1.2 per cent is being spent on ‘technical green skills’ education – and none of this seems to be directly funding learners to develop the technical skills required to retrofit homes
• The Mayor’s attempts to outsource strategic oversight of retrofit training via his flagship ‘Green skills hubs’ have failed to deliver, coming up with only three technical retrofit courses across 17 ‘green’ colleges
• The Mayor’s nebulous ‘green skills’ funding streams and training programmes are failing to address London’s specific skills needs, and amount to a greenwashing of City Hall’s skills offer

Upon publishing his new report, Green Party London Assembly Member Zack Polanski said:

“Londoners are already paying the price for the absence of the Mayor’s retrofit strategy – he needs to seize this issue, not revert to empty rhetoric and greenwashing his policies.

“The Mayor’s hands-off approach to retrofitting simply does not reflect the urgency of the task at hand. While the national Government must up its investment in retrofit, this doesn’t mean the Mayor can sit on his hands and wait.

“As Government rows-back on net zero commitments, the Mayor has a chance to show that green policies can and do work for everyone – protecting Londoners from sky-high energy costs while providing good, skilled jobs.”

The Report’s primary recommendations are as follows:

1. 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.
2. 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.

The full report can be viewed and downloaded on the website.