Why Health Should Be the Centrepiece of Retrofit Activity

By Matthew Allcock MRICS, Baily Garner

At a glance:

• Well-executed retrofit, overseen by trained professionals, delivers measurable health benefits including improved thermal comfort, reduced respiratory issues, and better mental wellbeing for residents

• Technical monitoring provides insight into how homes respond to occupancy, enabling landlords to prescribe interventions that support both building performance and resident health

• Positioning health as the primary motivation for retrofit makes the case for resident acceptance more likely and should create clearer accountability for programme outcomes 

Retrofit programmes tend to be focused and measured on delivering improved energy performance ratings, but this is not the be all and end all.

A common assumption is that energy performance and health outcomes are the same thing. In practice, they can diverge significantly. A home can achieve an improved Energy Performance Certificate rating while becoming prone to overheating or vulnerable to condensation.

Arguably, health outcomes, alongside understanding of how ventilation and thermal performance align, provide a more reliable, and perhaps accessible, measure of whether a home is functioning as intended because this reflects lived experience and resident needs rather than modelled performance. That said, it is important to acknowledge that a home subject to perfectly good and technically correct retrofit improvement can still be occupied in unintended ways and experience the associated health outcomes.