As councils and organisations get ready to apply for Wave 3 of the Warm Homes: Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, it’s useful to examine the critical role of behaviour in both intervention success and M&E design. Our research for the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero has shown that effective retrofitting goes beyond physical upgrades. It requires understanding of the behavioural and socio-economic factors that influence residents’ engagement and satisfaction.
For the first of two blogs, our Behavioural Economist, Leanne Kelly shares her tips to improve retrofit outcomes; by gathering household insights early, tailoring engagement strategies, and designing projects with co-benefits in mind. This kind of robust, behaviour-informed M&E is key to better outcomes, and scaling retrofit efforts much more efficiently across social housing.
As an innovation company owned by a local authority, and with the trials, engagement and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) work we do in communities, we understand the place-based, practical, and behavioural elements to schemes like the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund, which is open for Wave 3 applications.
Our Complex-to-Decarbonise (CTD) work with UCL for the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, for example, helped surface and evidence challenges and solutions for retrofit work. It gave a holistic picture of the complex challenge. The output of the work was an identification framework that integrated the physical, locational, occupant demographic, behavioural, and system-level attributes.
The Warm Homes fund has been an important vehicle for social housing retrofit, and laying critical foundations for energy system change – it has also provided the opportunity to demonstrate success and value to the wider sector and to private housing. There are of course challenges to its implementation, which M&E should capture, to reflect back lessons and best practices – and M&E should itself be designed to overcome challenges.
Here, I want to focus on the role of behaviour – in retrofit work, and in M&E design and delivery more generally – and share some of DG Cities’ tips to improve intervention delivery and evaluation in this space.
Behaviour matters
Behavioural attitudes, intentions and changes are critical to decarbonisation at scale. In terms of how aware and informed people and organisations are, how able and motivated they are to participate and respond to interventions, and how lived outcomes change. These outcomes often include subjective wellbeing considerations, like financial stress, place and housing satisfaction.
Behavioural attributes should be understood across a household’s whole user journey of retrofit: the design process, engagement and buy-in, work delivery, and post-work use and maintenance. These stages often require significant care and time and/or cost, whilst the decanting of residents for work and the disruption to their daily lives are critical factors to retrofit uptake and effectiveness. Therefore, understanding and shaping interventions through this user journey and project cycle can help to reduce drop-off, delay and disappointment.
Behaviour is only mentioned once in the DESNZ M&E Framework, with just a few mentions of satisfaction (2) and attitudes (2), with no inclusion of the term wellbeing. Our CTD work also found there were limited datasets for considering socio-economic barriers, impacts, distributional aspects beyond household characteristics and income data, and limited evidence on social and behavioural barriers. Nevertheless, our CTD research raised the need to include social, economic and behavioural attributes as they exacerbate the complexity and challenges to retrofit homes. Our interviews and case studies identified many useful examples.
“Many people don’t understand what it means to them, other people understand it as a cost, other people understand it as a comfort, so it needs a very different communication tool that you need to use to understand the urgency to improve their building... to use different tools depending on the group of people that you need to work with.” (Interviewee)
Low willingness to have one’s own home retrofitted needs to be recognised as a barrier, which has wider elements, both intrinsic (attitudes, knowledge, ability, disruption concern) and extrinsic (incentives, benefits framing) motivation. Ability, or perceived ability, matters too. Vulnerable households, those with health-related issues or potential push-back may or may not be initially known, but they can be identified (other services may know these householders better), empathised with (is home safe, familiar, under their control?), and planned with (why those times or that approach may not work with your family).
Councils can spend a great deal of time and money trying to reach, engage, inform, engage again, and understand a wide range of residents on decarbonisation, and there is a risk that some of these efforts don’t keep households in the programme or provide valuable final outcomes. This has ramifications for further council decarbonisation and place-based ambitions for that neighbourhood. It also matters in understanding and delivering a just transition, with any households being left behind.
Further, there may have been missed opportunities to utilise the retrofit and its engagement to meet other needs of households – opportunities to collaboratively share wider information or invite residents to local health, community or service activities/events - or to support the development of more neighbourhood connection and cohesion – a chance for people to interact positively with their neighbours.
Trying to mitigate risks has been reflected in some of our tips below for enhanced outputs and outcomes. For example, there is quite a gap between the basic M&E KPIs of Number of tenants engaged and signed up to works and Number of properties completed and various risks. These reflect some of what we have learnt through our monitoring and evaluation work.
DG Cities’ top three tips to aid better outcomes through design and delivery:
Undertake housing and household information gathering and profiles earlier on, identifying where ability or willingness for programme inclusion may be low and interaction more complex.
The CTD identification framework can be followed to consider a range of attributes, including physical and behavioural barriers and opportunities, recognising that varying levels of challenges exist across a stock of housing rather than the challenging and non-challenging ones. A range of methods can be used here.
As well as required in-house surveys, integrating wider service teams’ knowledge and behavioural frameworks like COM-B can be really useful. Build in understanding of resident attitudes, home behaviours and motivations to design and deliver the work, and tailor or disaggregate approaches as needed.
Tailor the outreach and engagement design in response to these barriers and enablers.
A range of routes and methods could be used, considering current communication and community channels, trusted local messengers, and collaborating with more embedded service teams.
Design with co-benefits – there may be clear ways for co-benefits to be delivered via the retrofit and energy works, such as street quality, home comfort and others that matter for the specific residents.
Creating a sense of shared neighbourhood aims and social connection and an individual sense of agency (having areas of choice, even if small, within the programme) have been found to work elsewhere. These may need to be better framed, explored with and presented to residents.
There may also be an opportunity or need to create a more beneficial offer, raising interest and motivation – could the retrofit journey be combined with other service delivery? Could residents jointly be informed on and access retrofit and other activities? Could the group of residents be brought together earlier, developing a sense of connection and familiarity before the improvement work?
Here, we have been exploring the concept of local activity matching in neighbourhoods as an efficient delivery model.
Of course, such approaches themselves need to be tested. M&E has a critical role in enabling design and delivery teams to learn what works. There is an important role for pilots here – trying, for example the profiling, tailoring and co-benefits designs above in relation to a wider cohort to assess if they worked better – and, if so, where. Doing so now, and continuing to learn with the monitoring of any different approaches and innovations, can help councils take forward the future scale of retrofit and heating works more efficiently. This is something our DG Cities team love to help with.