Combining tenure shift with retrofit could transform housing market weakness into an opportunity for systemic renewal, writes Becci Taylor, director and retrofit at scale business leader for UKIMEA at Arup
The introduction of Awaab’s Law represents a significant step forward for social housing tenants, requiring landlords to address hazards like damp and mould within strict timelines.
While this progress is in the social sector is welcomed, it highlights the need to address issues in the private rental sector: the tenure with the highest relative housing cost, poorest conditions (23% of privately rented homes still fail to meet the Decent Homes Standard), weakest household protections and slowest progress on retrofit.
For an equitable transition to better housing, we must shift from reactive fixes to proactive improvement. By adopting a preventative mindset and understanding how housing quality deteriorates across tenures, we can harness retrofit at scale to provide safe, carbon-efficient homes for all. And if we can provide more affordable housing at the same time as better quality, healthier, lower carbon housing, society wins on multiple fronts.
While the government works towards extending Awaab’s Law to private rentals through the Renters’ Rights Bill, understanding how social and private housing sectors intersect is crucial to tackling the systemic causes of poor-quality housing.
Reshaping the housing system through large-scale acquisitions
The forthcoming update to the Decent Homes Standard, alongside improved Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES) and the extension of Awaab’s Law to private rentals
will provide greater scrutiny to the quality of housing in the private rental sector. This has the potential to create higher quality private rentals, with the National Retrofit Hub having recently published a report that identifies the policy, financial and delivery mechanisms needed to ensure that MEES works for tenants, landlords and communities alike.
Guardrails are required to ensure that additional costs are not handed on to tenants as higher rents or lead to no fault evictions if landlords could choose to sell properties rather
than pay the cost to upgrade.
However, if carried out with the adequate protection in place for residents, increased quality control in private rental could create the opportunity to reinvigorate an asset class which has been under invested in.
And if private landlords choose to sell or fail to meet regulations, the large-scale acquisition of private rental properties by councils and housing associations – often with tenants remaining in their homes – could both increase supply of affordable homes and provide the opportunity to retrofit on a wider scale, as is explored in the 2024 Joseph Rowntree Foundation report.
Comprehensively retrofitting properties that have been bought into social ownership provides long-term holistic benefits across affordability, security and suitability. This approach, explored in initiatives like Homes that Don’t Cost the Earth, considers retrofit alongside affordability and environmental impact as part of a systems approach to delivering suitable homes.
Financing the transition of equitable retrofit
The cost of retrofit at scale remains a major obstacle. However, it can become more financially feasible for councils and housing associations by combining public grants with low-cost or guaranteed debt.
For example, the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (now transitioning into the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund) supports energy upgrades in social homes via grant subsidies.
Meanwhile, the National Wealth Fund is backing retrofit loans by major banks such as Lloyds and Barclays, providing guarantees (eg 70%–80%) to reduce borrowing risk and lower interest costs for social landlords.
By phasing works, prioritising homes with higher energy gains, clustering projects for scale and leveraging operational savings (lower energy and maintenance costs), the financial burden is reduced.
Moreover, efficiency gains from procurement, modular retrofit techniques and leveraging private capital via guarantees or green finance can help the government bridge the gap between retrofit cost and returns.
These financial solutions will play a critical role in enabling the UK to retrofit more of its housing stock, setting up both social and private rentals for success.
Systems approach for lasting change
Going forward, housing providers must embed retrofit into systems that prioritise maintenance, health, safety and energy efficiency together rather than separately. This cannot be achieved in isolation – public investment and national coordination must work alongside community engagement and private sector innovation.
Local authorities and housing associations should integrate retrofit thinking into routine maintenance cycles, normalising it as standard practice rather than as an exceptional intervention.
Community ownership is also growing as an approach to bringing currently unused homes back into affordable use, and improved quality control on private rental could further accelerate this. While there are hurdles to overcome in this model, such projects offer opportunity to introduce broader retrofit at a neighbourhood scale, building momentum.
If this can be achieved, the effect snowballs: street-by-street approaches allow residents to see retrofit benefits in nearby homes, creating peer-to-peer advocacy that formal marketing cannot match, and increasing demand for retrofit at scale.
Opportunity for transformation
By understanding the interplay between social and private housing sectors, we uncover opportunities for systemic change. Properties moving from private to social ownership become opportunities for both affordability and for comprehensive retrofit that delivers long-term value, reducing cost to the public sector over time and improving the lives of residents while reducing emissions.
This is about more than managing housing problems or after-the-fact fixes; it’s about seizing opportunities to improve lives systemically. If approached collaboratively, tenure shift combined with retrofit could turn housing market weakness into an opportunity for systemic renewal, expanding the supply of safe, affordable and energy-efficient homes while reducing emissions and public costs over time.
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