Ideological gaps between policy and practice

Overall, there seems to be a considerable gap in perception of what the retrofit industry and people working within it and around it think that national policy should be trying to do, and the context that it has actually created. The tensions caused by tackling fuel poverty and climate change as joint objectives generates significant frustrations for those enacting policy, as demonstrated by this quotation from a representative of a national sustainable housing charity:

“There is a moral issue here with ECO. A lot of people have been approaching this from a fuel poverty perspective and there is a huge target group for that, who should be first in line for ECO because they’re the most vulnerable. But if you really want to get a supply chain going and tackle carbon you really need to look at the Green Deal side of things too and many of those people will be eligible for ECO too, and there isn’t enough ECO to go round. So what’s more important? That’s something I find very difficult to reconcile.” SHAP representative

An installer also laments a feeling of injustice about how the policy context directs funding: “People are making life decisions about whether to turn on the electricity or feed their children. That’s disgusting in the year 2013. The government thinks ECO will sort that out, but it’s not. It’s as if they’ve deliberately made it unnecessarily hard to get the money to the people who need it the most.” ESC installer member 1

And finally, a council officer questions the ideological premise of the Green Deal as a market mechanism and its ultimate effectiveness:

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“The fundamental flaw in this is that Green Deal is a market mechanism. There’s a very good argument for why a national scheme of just fully funding it would pay for itself and more in social benefits, employment and so on, but there’s no room for that in the conversation.” BHEU retrofit officer.

Together, these perspectives demonstrate a significant scepticism of and challenge to the ideological foundations of the Green Deal and ECO policy context, by those charged with delivering and implementing these policy tools at the local level, indicating an ideological divide between the problem definitions at national and EU policy level and at the local level.

5.5 Summary

This chapter has presented an overview of the three key policies affecting domestic retrofit of privately owned and occupied homes in UK cities. It has outlined Green Deal, ECO and the Localism Act and has demonstrated how the agendas behind these policies have been produced and entwined over time, reflecting competing landscape issues from economic crisis, climate change and energy security, to shifting forms of urban governance. This suite of policies reflect the political priorities and context of the specific temporal zone in which they were produced, reflecting particular contemporary ideological and technological priorities in their focus on local economic growth, market-making and finance provision, solid wall insulation and boilers and a degree of devolution of decision making away from central government and both upwards towards EU policy and downwards to local

governance coalitions.

The function of this exercise was to populate some of the key issues and actors that may be common across the macro-level of the three case study experimental assemblages. This chapter has ascertained that this particular policy context created space and possibility for localised experimentation, and an expectation of variation between places. It also

necessitated the involvement of networks of actors crossing multiple scales and with various areas of expertise in responding to the different parts of the domestic retrofit problem. Furthermore, it fixed certain aspects of supranational, i.e. EU policy in the architecture of the retrofit process, thus setting significant rules and boundaries around retrofit practices, such as the mandatory Green Deal Assessment which starts the retrofit process for the householder, the Pay As You Save mechanism, creating industry

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accreditation for practitioners and prioritising solid wall insulation and boilers as technological fixes – with other measures often conditional on these.

What it also created, though, is a set of particular challenges for retrofit stakeholders ranging from complex financial issues with aligning Green Deal Finance and ECO to moral and ideological issues with what policy priorities should be, as well as an uncertain context for practitioners to work within due to previous experiences of abrupt policy changes. There were also challenges in the retrofit supply chain around overly onerous accreditation and reporting for ECO, as well as inconsistency in accessing it, and a persistent lack of

confidence in the Green Deal policy rhetoric from both government and the media. In system terms, the Green Deal/ECO framework represents an effort to create a new system for retrofit similar to that depicted by Swan (2013). But the focus on the financial and technological aspects of the socio-technical system for domestic energy use and the lack of attention to the social, cultural and people-focussed elements - along with a lack of

regulation - produces an imbalanced or incomplete system. This significantly limits the possibilities for change that localised experiments can effect because in transitions thinking, change can only be effected if all the levels and parts of the system work in harmony to do so (REF again).

The entwinement of places and spaces within this as loci for experimentation and the positioning of localised urban networks as becoming responsible for acting on retrofit through the city deals and DECC-combined funding, adds another critical factor to the possibilities for change: the place-specific nature of those networks and the particular capacities and skills that they encompass. This makes highly relevant the observations of Brenner (2004 and 2009) and Swyngedouw (2010) of the varying, place-specific and often temporary configurations that coalesce around such issues in urban spaces, with networks often engaging directly from local level with global circuits of capital and governance structures, and the differential levels of influence of different interest groups that are created by these coalitions of actors under the conditions of economic competition. Having populated the landscape area of the assemblage the thesis will now examine three different experimental urban responses to the issue of domestic retrofit, and how they each connect with and navigate that landscape.

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