It seems a simple enough question: how can tenants, landlords and others work together to tackle climate change in our homes and neighbourhoods?
More than a million social housing homes in the north of England will need retrofitting to bring them in line with government’s 2050 zero-carbon targets. This is a job that can only be tackled by each and every housing provider; and they can only do the job properly if each and every household is a willing partner.
Successive ‘stock improvement programmes’ – the kind of phrase unlikely to win hearts and minds, yet still too often used – have taught us that ordering tenants to hold their nose and take the dose of what’s good for them, along with all the disruption that comes with it, rarely achieves anything near wholehearted buy-in.
As the saying goes, to make something different happen, do something different. Liam Gregson, Membership Engagement Manager at the Northern Housing Consortium, recently told an NFA webinar attended by more than a 100 of our members’ staff about how they responded to the concerns of social housing providers in the north of England about the colossal task of retrofitting and upgrading EPC ratings in response to climate change.
It’s a job that requires command of the technology, the expertise, the resources ¬– and, most of all, the essential buy-in from residents themselves. He and his colleagues realised that this process had to start with a reminder that all these flats and houses are more than ‘properties’; they are people’s homes.
Citizens’ juries first made their appearance in the US in the late 1970s as a way of extending democratic debate beyond the ballot box, and they are increasingly being used in the UK to both spread wider knowledge and build genuine involvement in social change among the people who will actually have to live with the decisions of policymakers.
Climate change is an issue which citizens’ juries in cities such as Leeds, Kendal and Southwark have already debated, but this hadn’t yet been tried at scale in a sector, rather than an area. We all know that a ‘get what you’re given’ attitude still lingers around social housing. Where it persists, it obviously disempowers tenants and, perhaps less obviously, cuts landlords off from the feedback and buy-in they need to deliver the best possible service.
In partnership with five NCH members (Salix Homes, First Choice Homes Oldham, Karbon Homes, Thirteen Group and Yorkshire Housing), Liam and his colleagues decided to find out whether the citizens’ jury approach could push past that.

Citizens’ juries produce well-informed recommendations that take into account residents’ lived experience – powerful stuff.