This interdisciplinary research project investigated the progress made by the London Mayoral Office in upgrading 100,000 fuel poor home in London, as part of the pledge to the Just Transition campaign led by the NGO, Citizens UK. The project was partly funded by the Participatory Research Fund and was led by Dr Rosa Schiano-Phan and Dr Maria Christina Georgiadou.
The study included a literature review and analysis of relevant existing databases and published reports, planning portals of London Boroughs and the GLA. An overview of existing theoretical frameworks around fuel poverty, energy efficiency and retrofitting in domestic buildings and properties was conducted, and fresh data on the number of retrofit actions conducted by the 33 London Boroughs between 2021 and 2023 was collected through Freedom of Information requests. The results showed that the uptake on retrofits from 2021 was still low and far from reaching 100k homes while the net zero target in 2030 is approaching fast. It also showed a gap in data and a fragmentation of such data, between council led social housing, housing associations and the private sector. The study concluded that most indicators of fuel poverty in the UK were increasing with rising energy prices. Other forms of fuel poverty assessment and prediction, such as the London Building Stock Model (LBSM) is not widely used by boroughs, and it only maps the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating which is not sufficient to identify households in fuel poverty. Most schemes such as Energy Companies Obligation (ECO) do not specifically target fuel poverty but have a wider scope of retrofit towards net zero. This calls for the Mayor of London to explore a new indicator tool by crossing data from LBSM with socio-economic data to identify fuel poor households more accurately and plan for adequate retrofit interventions.
The research’s outputs included: a stakeholder workshop with the GLA, politicians, representatives of the London Boroughs officials, architects and academics held at the University of Westminster in July 2023; A report on ‘Tackling Fuel Poverty In London’, and a journal article on ‘Assessing Retrofit Policies for Fuel Poor Homes in London’ published in 2024.
