HomeWorks

Most homes that get retrofitted do so because the boiler breaks, the kitchen needs replacing, or the owner decides to renovate. Energy efficiency is rarely the primary motivation — and when a tradesperson arrives, their job is to do what they were called for and leave. HomeWorks set out to change that: to turn the moment of that first trade contact into the entry point for coordinated whole-home improvement.

The programme, led by BRE and funded by BEIS, was piloted in Cornwall — one of England's most fuel-poor regions, with 61% of homes off-gas and 14% of households in fuel poverty. Over three years it developed and deployed a suite of tools, training, and financial incentives that enabled any local tradesperson to become an active participant in the retrofit supply chain.

The insight

Kitchen fitters fit kitchens. Cavity wall installers fill cavity walls. And never the twain shall meet.

The retrofit supply chain has long been fragmented. Individual tradespeople — the people homeowners actually trust and contact — have no motivation, tools, or financial incentive to recommend complementary energy efficiency measures. A homeowner replacing their kitchen has the house open, the walls exposed, and a contractor on site: precisely the moment to consider insulation, ventilation, or heating upgrades. But nothing in the market structure connects those dots.

HomeWorks was designed to fix that connection — not by creating a new bureaucratic referral system, but by giving tradespeople the training, tools, and tangible financial reward to make it worth their while.

How it worked

The referral incentive was carefully structured to avoid perverse outcomes: it only triggered for measures appropriate to the specific property and in the right sequence; it rewarded completed, quality-checked works rather than speculative leads; and it required the referring tradesperson to have achieved minimum training standards. This kept the incentive aligned with genuine homeowner benefit rather than commission-chasing.

The Cornwall context

Cornwall was chosen as the pilot area for good reason. It presented an unusually challenging combination: high fuel poverty, predominantly off-gas heating, older housing stock, lower-than-average household incomes, and a dispersed rural population that national programmes consistently struggled to reach.

The programme complemented rather than duplicated the emerging Each Home Counts (EHC) framework — PAS2030, PAS2035, and TrustMark's Quality Mark — by deliberately targeting the large proportion of homeowners who never initiate contact with the formal energy retrofit system. If EHC was building the infrastructure for retrofit, HomeWorks was recruiting the people most likely to reach the homeowners it couldn't.

The standards backbone

HomeWorks was designed to sit squarely within the emerging professional standards framework, not alongside it. TrustMark — the Government-endorsed quality scheme covering all trades — was a core delivery partner, responsible for network operation and quality assurance. The programme's risk-based approach to measure classification (Low / Medium / High risk per PAS2035) determined which tradespeople could recommend what: low-risk measures for all trained network members; higher-risk works requiring a qualified Retrofit Designer, Assessor, or Project Manager.

Financial products (including improvement loans via BNP Paribas) and warranty services were integrated into the network offer, providing the homeowner with a complete package — trade, quality assurance, finance, and warranty — from a single trusted point of contact.

The consortium