Sharon Bhorkar

Of the 28 million residential properties within the UK, 19 million are poorly insulated and hence energy inefficient. It is a challenge to improve the energy efficiency of these buildings. Retrofitting measures reduce energy consumption in homes and improve occupant comfort, make homes healthier and reduce fuel bills. Local authorities across the UK are undertaking thousands of retrofits each year; however, the measurement of the impact of these retrofit activities is haphazard. The retrofit assessments taking place are fragmented, complex to implement, expensive, inconsistent in their approach, and therefore not a comparable, standardised assessment of the retrofit work done. The lessons learnt and best practices are not being shared, and there remains uncertainty around the benefits that are being delivered to communities. This research aims to understand how to improve retrofit assessments. To address this problem, the UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) developed a toolkit called the Build Upon 2 Framework. It was meant to evaluate retrofit projects and standardise how to quantify social, environmental and economic benefits of projects. In addition to collecting technical data from energy models such as the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) and economic data from contractors, the toolkit uses the occupant questionnaire as a central tool to understand the impact of the retrofit from the occupant’s perspective. However, the questionnaire is untested; this research aims to explore its effectiveness and make recommendations on its development and implementation. It analyses the results from a case study retrofit project in the North of England where it was deployed by a local council. This research may lead to the revision of the UKGBC toolkit, which may be adopted by other organisations wishing to undertake standardised evaluations of their retrofit projects and may also be used as a reference toolkit by organisations funding retrofit to ensure their projects include consistent retrofit evaluations.

Retrofit projects can have multiple socio-environmental benefits, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, reduce environmental impacts, extending the life of buildings, promoting renewable energy use, and improving occupant comfort, health and wellbeing. Additionally, they can have economic benefits such as lowering energy bills and creating skilled jobs. However, measuring the benefits from retrofits can be challenging. This study employs the Build Upon 2 (BU2) toolkit to evaluate the economic benefits of five case study, area-based, domestic retrofit projects managed by a local authority in the North of England between 2022 and 2024. Stakeholders such as project managers, contractors, and quantity surveyors were interviewed to explore how data on economic benefits of retrofit projects can be captured and assessed using the BU2 tool. The analysis revealed a complexity of challenges in acquiring data on the financial details of the project and fuel bill savings. Recommendations to improve processes include a top-down approach to data collection and streamlining of the data collection and evaluation process.

Considering the growing concern for sustainability within the development of smart cities and the pressing need for a holistic approach to new urban developments, this study presents a systematic literature review covering the past 50 years on “Smart cities within the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC)”. All relevant journal articles were analysed. Primarily, the aim was to understand the mushrooming smart cities developments within the GCC countries. The main constructs were identified from the wider literature on smart cities: challenges and drivers. These were then explored in the context of the development of smart cities within the GCC countries, and the subsequent themes and factors were mapped. Furthermore, these factors were evaluated in the context of the sizable expatriate population residing within the GCC countries and the impact of COVID-19 on them. The analysis of the articles revealed specific gaps in the literature on smart cities within the GCC countries with respect to the expatriate population as well as the impact of COVID-19. The main findings indicated the need for further empirical studies about developing and implementing smart cities initiatives across the region, holistically, while considering the impact of COVID-19 on the expatriate population within the GCC amid this transformation.

Evaluating the performance of domestic retrofits is essential in appraising their success and identifying if they improved the lives of occupants. In the UK, billions of pounds are invested annually in retrofits through policy funding, however, current building regulations do not mandate evaluation, and monitoring requirements are poorly defined. Without agreed standardised protocols or tools, retrofit evaluations remain inconsistent and incomparable, providing little assurance to occupants, landlords, installers, or the government. Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is a common and well-established form of building performance evaluation (BPE) used in retrofit evaluations; however, it faces challenges in multi-dwelling retrofit schemes. This research evaluated the effectiveness of occupancy evaluation surveys in five domestic retrofit projects overseen by a local authority in Northern England between 2022 and 2024. Phase one implemented a retrofit survey taken from the UKGBCs BuildUpon2 Framework. In phases two and three, iterative improvements were made to the survey based on feedback from occupants and surveyors from the previous phases. Five key barriers were identified: resources, technical challenges, surveyor engagement, trust, and accessibility. Addressing these challenges increased the survey response rate from 25% to 98%. The refinements significantly improved the quality and usefulness of the data collected, offering valuable insights for designing robust, easily implementable occupant surveys.