Several members took part in the fund’s pilot scheme and around half of NFA members have also been successful in bidding for follow-on SHDF Wave 1 funding.

The pilot scheme’s whole-house retrofit approach has brought some remarkable successes and, importantly, helped contractors gain the skills needed to upgrade the energy efficiency of existing homes and started to establish a supply chain for this kind of work.

The NFA briefing will examine how ALMOs have used the funding to retrofit homes, looking at approaches to tenant involvement and communication, building the supply chain and investing in green jobs.

“The SHDF has been, in my view, a significant disruptor,” says Paul Tucker, Sustainability Manager at Northampton Partnership Homes where the grant helped retrofit 150 homes owned by West Northants Council.

“It is an extremely effective carrot. At NPH, it has pushed us to really up our game. It’s shifted our thinking from a focus on individual measures – insulation, low carbon heating and so forth – to a holistic overview of what we want to achieve.

“It is the difference between incremental improvements with no long-term vision and a strategic approach to achieving fully net-zero homes.”

Over the next few months, NFA Policy and Research Officer Lisa Birchall will bring together the experiences of all the NFA members involved in the pilot and aim to distil the most important learnings into an NFA policy brief, due to be published in September.

Later this year, this work will also be the basis of a webinar co-hosted with council housing sector partners ARCH and CWAG to help share the findings as widely as possible.

• For more details of the NFA retrofit webinar, please contact Events Manager Alli Ward [alli.ward@almos.org.uk]