Decarbonisation must become business-as-usual for tradespeople
Written by admin on December 10, 2025
Anna Scothern is chief executive of the National Home Improvement Council and chair of both the Construction Leadership Council repairs, maintenance and improvement (RMI) working group, and Construction Skills Mission Board RMI skills group
The national conversation about improving our homes often begins with technology and targets. But behind every upgraded boiler, insulated wall or efficient window stands a person – a tradesperson whose knowledge, confidence and pride determine whether progress is real or rhetorical.
Across the UK, that workforce is shrinking.
“Capacity to repair, maintain and improve housing stock is eroding, just when demand is set to rise sharply”
More than 80 per cent of those keeping Britain’s homes warm, safe and efficient are small or micro-businesses, and most of their owners are over 50.
New entrants are scarce, and the streams that once attracted young people into building trades have thinned to a trickle.
The result is a quiet crisis: the capacity to repair, maintain and improve the nation’s housing stock is eroding, just when demand is set to rise sharply.
It is tempting to describe this only as a “retrofit skills shortage”, but that framing is too narrow.
The challenge is not a specialist niche that a short-term training scheme can fix. It is a structural gap in the everyday workforce that looks after our 29 million homes.
If we treat decarbonisation as an add-on, we will forever be chasing a separate “green” workforce. The real opportunity is to make low-carbon know-how intrinsic to every competent installer, builder and engineer, so that decarbonisation simply becomes business-as-usual.
Gap between policy and practice
Through its membership and work with the Construction Leadership Council and Construction Skills Mission Board (CSMB), the National Home Improvement Council (NHIC) has been gathering evidence from right across the home-improvement sector.
Our members, from merchants and manufacturers to accreditation bodies and consumer schemes, have contributed data showing where policy, perception and practical delivery fall out of step.
The insight is consistent: the people already inside Britain’s homes are the key to scaling quality improvement and lowering carbon at pace, but they need coherent systems that respect their professionalism and reduce the friction of doing the right thing.
When these values are applied to the skills agenda, they become practical levers for change.
Reducing complexity means aligning existing training, accreditation and funding routes so small businesses and sole traders can access them without bureaucracy.
Respecting the workforce means paying attention to how work is specified, valued and rewarded, not just how it is certified. Rebuilding trust means closing the loop between consumer experience, installer feedback and policy design.
NHIC’s work with Innovate UK and the wider CSMB evidence programme is running roundtables with installers, evidence synthesis for policymakers and collaborative projects that pilot new approaches to brokerage, onboarding and quality assurance.
Each piece of research reinforces the same message: that the domestic repair and improvement workforce is the foundation of national resilience. If we strengthen that foundation, the carbon savings will follow naturally.
Decarbonising homes is not a separate industry. It is the next chapter in the long tradition of British home improvement. By embedding new knowledge into familiar trades, by valuing the people who already hold the keys to our housing stock, we can normalise change rather than continually reinvent it.
If we want to meet our environmental goals, we must first rebuild the systems of respect and trust that keep every tradesperson and every household invested in the outcome. Because the true measure of progress isn’t the number of homes retrofitted, it’s the number of professionals empowered to make better homes part of everyday practice.
Anna Scothern will be speaking at Construction News’ Retrofit in Focus event on 18 November in London
