Today, 5 February 2025, MIMA published a detailed discussion paper: Making Performance-led Home Retrofit a Reality.
Seven recommendations
The paper makes seven recommendations for UK policy and industry standards, geared towards building strong consumer trust and confidence in home retrofit as we transition to Net Zero. It also discusses insulation’s important role within our framework and within the context of the electrification of home heating.
To ‘take people with us’ on this transition, the insulation, energy efficiency, and clean heat sectors need to work closely together to ensure we achieve reliably good, proven outcomes for customers when retrofitting their homes.
If we, as an industry, can commit to checking, verifying, and increasingly guaranteeing aspects of building performance as the housing stock is decarbonised, we take many of the real or perceived risks of the transition off the shoulders of householders and onto ourselves. We can better assure customers of a positive retrofit experience and a great outcome, ensuring the energy savings and emissions reductions aimed for are realised, and people’s homes are comfortable, healthy, and safe to live in.
By 2030
To achieve these goals, MIMA is calling for policy and standards to evolve so that by 2030:
- Measuring key aspects of home energy performance has become the norm. Underpinned by three ‘Ms’: measurement, metering, and monitoring of home energy performance, all UK households getting a home fabric and/or clean heat upgrade should be able to opt for a service from their Retrofit Provider which includes checks of the actual performance of the fabric and clean heating system, pre- and/or post retrofit as appropriate, using accredited methods, technologies, and forms of monitoring.
- An ever-growing number of households can benefit from ‘Outcomes-Based Guarantees’. Fabric upgrades and clean heating systems working together in homes, alongside widespread and routine checks of their in-use performance, will enable and encourage more Retrofit Providers to innovate with market offerings we are calling Outcomes-Based Guarantees. These are optional contracts with customers whose terms assure or guarantee certain outcomes from a home upgrade, such as a specified, minimum heating system efficiency or agreed energy saving in kWh.
This approach to delivery is based on a simple set of guiding principles:
MIMA’s vision
Sarah Kostense-Winterton, MIMA’s Executive Director comments, “MIMA’s vision is for every household getting their home’s fabric or heating system upgraded to be offered a form of Outcomes-Based Guarantee from their Retrofit Provider. An assurance and proof the retrofit work "does what it says on the tin."
Fortunately, we are now in an era where an increasing number of relatively low-cost, low disruption technologies and methods exist to measure how homes perform in terms of their heat demand, energy use, and emissions. Making such testing routine not only drives the development of new Outcomes-Based Guarantees, but means Retrofit Providers and their customers no longer need to rely solely on modelled performance estimates which can differ significantly to measured results.
MIMA is calling for such outcomes-focused targets and policies to be woven into the very fabric of the Warm Homes Plan, helping to de-risk the journey to low energy, low emissions homes, for the consumer and for the Government.”
For further details, please contact:
Sarah Kostense-Winterton, Executive Director
Email: sarah@mima.info
Tel: 020 7293 0870