ABSTRACT

The energy performance of housing is a crucial element in plans for climate change mitigation, future energy supply and addressing energy poverty. The age of the UK housing stock, and its slow rate of replacement, indicate that attention needs to be focussed in particular on improving existing homes, a high proportion of which are private owner occupied. Thus, the improvements necessary to achieve carbon reductions will require both large scale investment and likely lead to significant disruption. The thriving home repair, maintenance and improvement market, delivered largely by small building trades companies and sole traders, offers practical opportunities and a potential route to market for such improvements. Set against the context of high-level strategic targets, this paper draws on qualitative research at the micro level and presents a framework for the changes that will be needed to enable this to happen in practice, as well as insights into current practice and the existing regime in which the industry operates. Through application of a multi-level perspective to this socio-technical challenge, the work identifies the levels at which such changes should occur, and uses the results to develop and identify key weaknesses and solutions to enable change.

摘要

住房的能源绩效是减缓气候变化、未来能源供应和解决能源贫困计划的关键要素。英国住房存量的年龄及其缓慢的更新速度表明，需要特别关注改善现有房屋，其中很大一部分是私人业主。因此，实现碳减排所需的改进将需要大规模投资，并可能导致重大破坏。主要由小型建筑贸易公司和个体贸易商提供的蓬勃发展的家庭维修、维护和改善市场为此类改善提供了实际机会和进入市场的潜在途径。以高层次战略目标为背景，本文借鉴了微观层面的定性研究，并提出了在实践中实现这一目标所需的变革框架，以及对当前实践和行业运作的现有制度的见解。通过对这一社会技术挑战应用多层次的视角，这项工作确定了应该发生这种变化的层次，并利用结果来开发和确定关键的弱点和解决方案，以实现变革。