Energiesprong UK (ESUK) is one of the five founder members of Transform-ER. Its team of retrofit experts have been working to accelerate better retrofit in the UK for the last decade.
ESUK has always seen the need for increased collaboration in the sector. Founded as a membership organisation by 12 organisations, this spirit was embedded at the heart of its original mission to create a market that delivers high-quality, high-performance retrofit at scale.
“Creating a collaborative culture will not only enable retrofit at scale and speed, but also make the sector more appealing to a wider range of more diverse voices – benefitting everyone.”
Over the last 10 years, it has worked on several large, multi-stakeholder retrofit programmes that have covered both on-the-ground delivery as well as transformational approaches to rethinking how we deliver retrofit. This includes the Mayor of London’s Retrofit Accelerator – Homes Innovation Partnership, Mustbe0 and Transform-ER.
One of ESUK’s most fundamental lessons about creating genuine collaboration has been that the sector needs to dramatically change its approach to contracting and risk – moving beyond traditional adversarial contracting relationships.
The approaches tried-and-tested, and lessons learned
A Solution Provider role, intended to integrate the supply chain.
- Where the company is small enough for the lead person’s values to be embedded across the team, this has created some great integrated solutions and companies.
- Where the company is big, we have found this role less effective in integrating the supply chain. Fairly standard main contracting has occurred, where risk is passed down, and suppliers are kept away from clients.
Procuring based on fixed price and performance outcomes.
- Greater focus on performance outcome, with the perception that performance was more important than cost, meant sometimes costs increased for marginal gains.
- It worked better in projects where client and Solution Provider communicated effectively about pros and cons and made joint decisions to optimise cost / benefit.
- Success was very reliant on the approach of the involved people; their skills and communication abilities were crucial. Where this was not in place or didn’t come naturally, the commercial structure needed to ensure collaboration and open communication.
Creating a Collaboration Hub via Mayor of London’s Retrofit Accelerator – Homes Innovation Partnership.
- Created space for open discussion on problem solving, solutions, and how to scale.
- Individuals formed strong bonds, with behaviours and values aligning
- Trust between solution providers was high. Trust between clients was high. Trust between clients and solution providers could have been improved with different commercial arrangements.
“I’ve been in the sector for 25+ years and we talk about it a lot, but this is probably the only example I can give in my career where we have truly collaborated with competitors.”
Vicky Fordham-Lewis, Managing Director of Osborne Property Solutions (at the time)
Discover more insights from the Collaboration Hub and the experience of Solution Providers.
A more fundamental systemic shift is needed
Following several years of effort, ESUK’s reflection was that we needed a financially sustainable vehicle for systemic market transformation. Project-by-project, grant-funded pilots will not create the right market structures for collaboration.
And this became part of ESUK’s focus as lead partner for the Innovate UK funded Transform-ER project, with its ambition to create a new retrofit delivery vehicle to enable a sector that can deliver 1m home energy upgrades every year by 2030.
This included in-depth research into previous retrofit projects have gone wrong, exploring successful industry case studies like Heathrow T5 and engaging with the sector about their perspectives on collaboration.
Why relationships matter in retrofit
It became clear that aligning on values and creating projects where risk and rewards are shared across the project consortiums are essential. This has informed the development of Transform-ER’s new end-to-end service for delivering home energy upgrades at scale, including its use of alliancing models.
Transform-ER is a hugely complex, multi-stakeholder innovation project that’s achieving brilliant progress towards its mission of enabling retrofit at scale and speed. Energiesprong UK’s leadership has been instrumental in shaping and supporting this terrific collaboration.
Walking the talk
As part of Transform-ER’s commitment to collaboration, we created a culture change programme to inform our efforts, including a suite of tools to support progress. ESUK’s culture change lead Stephanie Ah Tchou has turned this into a toolkit for use by the wider industry.
This contains 13 tools for nurturing collaboration, including tried-and-tested tactics by the ESUK team like celebrating efforts and building relationships through informal gatherings with food and drink.
Energiesprong UK brings its lived experience within its own organisation and with its partners to Transform-ER’s collaborative approach and has helped embed this firmly within its new delivery model. Find out more about our approach.
Let’s transform retrofit – together
