Innovation

Innovation is an important element of our continuous improvement culture.

We are always looking for new ways to raise industry standards, to add value to our clients’ projects, and to improve outcomes for the thousands of residents whose homes we improve every year.

Below are just a few recent examples of our innovative projects.

“POST-FREE” Finance Solution

In early 2024, our point-of-sale finance solution for home retrofits was awarded nearly £1.8 million in government funding.

The solution’s full name is “Point-of-Sale Technology for Financing Retrofits & Energy Efficiency” (POST-FREE) and it’s is the result of a collaboration with the green homes finance specialist, Scroll Finance. Fundamentally, its purpose is to make residential retrofit decarbonisation projects more affordable for homeowners and landlords.

It completed its ‘Discovery Phase’ in 2023, with support from the Green Home Finance Accelerator, which is part of the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio. That phase was designed to evaluate potential barriers to the adoption of domestic energy efficiency measures, and to test the product’s ability to reduce the hurdles typically associated with high up-front costs. Having proven its feasibility, it was then awarded the additional funding to begin a more extensive pilot phase. This will seek to translate the initial findings into tangible, real-world applications.

Following the announcement, Scroll Finance wrote:

“Scroll is proud to have partnered with Sustainable Building Services UK and Sustainable Energy Services UK to build a point-of-sale finance platform ‘Green Finance Hub’ for funding home retrofit decarbonisation projects. Through (it), Scroll will offer Sustainable Group’s ‘able-to-pay’ customers a range of financing options from a panel of lenders. Customers will be able to blend eligible government grants with loans through a seamless journey to fund retrofit measures.”

Social Housing Management Tool

Sustainable Building Services has developed a new smart-social-housing platform. Known as “Smart Technology for Social Housing Management”, the platform integrates sensor data, analytics and client insights to support improvements in productivity, emission-reductions and tenants’ quality-of-life.

Showing before-and-after performance data from net-zero interventions, it also supports clients in gaining the maximum possible value from government grant programmes and will help them meet regulatory requirements such as:

Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023
Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill
Awaab’s Law
Ella’s Law

The tool comes with FCA-compliant financial advice and useful features such as finance calculators and a grant wizard to check eligibility for national-level grants.

In addition, it helps clients to achieve compliance with relevant funding requirements regarding energy efficiency and tenant wellbeing.

Staff Training

We have also taken an innovative approach with regard to staff training and skills. We offer all staff (not just site teams) the opportunity to enrol on vocational training courses delivered by the Retrofit Academy. The intention is to ensure that we engrain a solid understanding of retrofit principle throughout the organisation, including call centre staff, administrators, tenant liaison officers and others. In this way, we can ensure a good, prompt and meaningful response to any customer enquiry. (See Work With Us for more details of our staff training policies.)