Professor Yolande Barnes joins our forum on the retrofitting of homes for energy efficiency

Above: Professor Yolande Barnes, Chair of the Bartlett Real Estate Institute (while taking part in a Future Cities Forum pre-election discussion)

Future Cities Forum is welcoming back Professor Yolande Barnes, Chair of The Bartlett Real Estate Institute.

Yolande has been examining and analysing real estate markets since 1986..As Director of World Research at Savills, Yolande provided evidence-based advice to clients and thought-leadership in real estate.

In 1989, she set up and ran the UK residential research department, then pioneered and developed new techniques for measuring place potential, land values and sustainable urbanism. In 2012, she applied these techniques globally and in 2014 took on all sectors worldwide, focusing on cities.

Since 2018, as a practice professor at UCL, Yolande teaches modules on asset management, real estate value -in its broadest sense, professional practice, property development and evaluation. She regularly gives lectures on real estate, design and value, innovation, world markets and careers in property to a variety of students at UCL, Oxford and Cambridge.

She is an advisor to a variety of different enterprises and organisations, an NED at Space Syntax Ltd., President of Society of Property Researchers, Design Council Ambassador, Honorary Fellow of RIBA, Academician of Urbanism and Fellow of Higher Education Academy.  She writes regularly for industry journals, client publications and newspapers, is frequently quoted in the national and international press on a variety of property-related topics, and often appears on television and radio. Yolande will be speaking about the challenges to the retrofitting of homes in the UK.

The new UK government is committed to large-scale retrofitting of housing to cut carbon emissions and address fuel poverty. To achieve that, the Building Research Establishment (BRE) argues that it is time to reform the methodology for producing energy performance certificates (EPCs). It says by doing so, these certificates can offer much better information and guidance for homeowners, encouraging them to make effective energy and carbon-saving home improvements.

It states:

'The idea of improving EPCs is not new, though. The certificates were introduced in 2008, and in 2020 the then Conservative government published plans to update some of the systems used in preparing them. Labour should therefore prioritise the publication of its own plans for reforming the certificates as soon as possible.

'The new administration has already announced that a consultation will take place by the end of the year, alongside details of its Warm Homes Plan retrofitting programme. It has said this will be issued after the Spending Review, likely to be in the spring.

'In January 2024, BRE published Energy performance certificates: enabling the home energy transition, a report giving recommendations for EPC reform.

'Official research, published in March 2023, shows that around 30% of the British public say they know or have a sense of their home's EPC rating, while just 5% have acted on their certificates' recommendations.

'BRE's proposed reforms focus on making EPC information more useful and relevant for householders, enabling them to understand their home's energy efficiency and encouraging them to consider upgrades to insulation, heating and solar panels.

'One of the reforms would be calculating domestic energy performance using the new Home Energy Model (HEM), which BRE is helping to develop for the government as a full update to the current Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) calculation engine.

'A key advantage of this is that, while SAP will model a year of energy use month by month, HEM does so half-hourly. This granularity enables the model to better reflect increasingly common smart technologies such as battery storage, whose benefits derive from using energy flexibly at different times of the day.'