Rethinking decision‐making about home improvements

For the UK to meet its commitments to tackle the climate crisis it must improve the energy efficiency of its housing stock. The country's housing stock is the oldest in Europe, with 11 per cent of homes classified as ‘poor quality’, presenting serious implications for residents’ health, wellbeing, and energy bills. Meanwhile, energy use in homes accounts for roughly 14 per cent of the country's carbon emissions. Policy interventions to accelerate retrofit have had limited success thus far and there is a substantial body of research into why this is the case. This research has tended to frame the failure of these policies in terms of 1) the organisation of the market, 2) behavioural influences, 3) technical issues, and 4) financial barriers.

“there is underlying and flawed tendency within UK energy policy to frame homeowners as rational actors”

It is important to identify these problems; however, simply removing these barriers is insufficient to improve the success of these policies. Across each of these issues, there is underlying and flawed tendency within UK energy policy to frame homeowners as rational actors, whose engagement with policy is based on the right financial offer. Researchers have noted the limitations of this framing but it is still necessary to develop an alternative approach to understand how people make decisions about their homes. In a recent paper, we propose a social relations approach to challenge the framing of the rational-actor conceptualisation of homeowners and the factors that shape decision making. This article summarises our findings and highlights the implications for retrofit policy.