This paper investigates the opportunities and barriers to business engagement in the UK domestic retrofit sector. There are approximately 28 million UK dwellings accounting for 30% of UK total energy consumption. Almost all of the existing housing stock will require some form of retrofit in order to meet the UK Government’s Net Zero emissions target by 2050. However, adoption has been much lower than required. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with industry professionals to investigate the key barriers and opportunities for businesses in the retrofit market. The results suggest that there is significant opportunity for businesses, but engagement has been suppressed by three main categories of barriers: (1) Those that cause lack of consumer demand; (2) Those that constrain retrofit projects, limiting their volume and scalability; (3) Those resulting from a lack of government will or direction. Business opportunity for retrofit was seen to extend globally, with substantial market growth possible. The paper suggests potential roles and solutions key stakeholders could take to achieve the volume of retrofit required. The findings should be of interest to all stakeholders who wish to overcome the multitude of barriers to business engagement in the retrofit sector and realise the potential opportunities.

Practical application: This study aims to understand the barriers preventing the large-scale adoption of domestic retrofit in the UK in order to identify avenues for increasing business engagement in the sector. Potential areas believed to present significant opportunity for businesses when engaging in, developing and upscaling the retrofit process and solutions are highlighted. This paper should be of interest to building industry professionals already or wanting to undertake domestic retrofit works in future. The paper also gathers the views of current building industry professionals through semi-structured interviews providing an industry centric assessment of the sector’s challenges and possible solutions.

本文调查了英国国内改造行业中商业参与的机会和障碍。英国约有2千8百万套住房，占英国总能源消耗的30％。几乎所有现有住房都将需要某种形式的改造，以实现英国政府到2050年实现净零排放的目标。然而，采用率却大大低于要求。与行业专业人士进行了半结构化访谈，以调查翻新市场中企业面临的主要障碍和机遇。结果表明，企业存在大量机会，但参与主要受到三类主要障碍的压制：（1）导致缺乏消费者需求的障碍；（2）那些限制改造项目，限制其数量和可扩展性的项目；（3）由于缺乏政府意愿或指导而产生的。改造的商机被认为在全球范围内扩展，并可能实现巨大的市场增长。该文件提出了关键利益相关者可以采取的潜在角色和解决方案，以实现所需的改造量。所有希望克服改造行业中的业务参与障碍并意识到潜在机会的利益相关者都应该对调查结果感兴趣。

实际应用：这项研究旨在了解阻碍英国大规模采用家庭装修的障碍，以便找到增加该行业业务参与的途径。强调了潜在领域为企业提供了参与，开发和升级改造过程及解决方案的重要机会。本文对于已经或希望将来进行家庭改造工作的建筑行业专业人员而言应该是有意义的。本文还通过半结构化访谈收集了当前建筑行业专业人员的观点，对行业挑战和可能的解决方案进行了以行业为中心的评估。