Achieving net zero will require transforming the homes we already live in. Improving the energy efficiency of residential buildings in the UK is critical for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, lowering energy bills, and improving household wellbeing. Despite growing policy attention, available technologies, and financial support schemes, the pace of home retrofit remains far below what is needed. In this blog, Lory Barile asks: if many people support climate action and want warmer, more affordable homes, why do they not retrofit?
The puzzle: why so little retrofitting?
For many years, behavioural interventions have focused on helping individuals make better environmental choices through tools such as nudges: simplifying information, changing defaults, or making sustainable options more salient. These approaches have delivered important insights. However, focusing only on individual-level behaviour change risks overlooking the wider systems that constrain people’s decisions.
Housing retrofit illustrates this challenge clearly.
Unlike switching off lights or reducing food waste, retrofitting a home is not a simple everyday choice. It involves uncertainty, financial decisions, disruption, technical complexity, and trust in multiple organisations. A household may be highly motivated to act but still struggle to navigate the system.
In other words, retrofit is not simply an information deficit problem. It is a capability, opportunity, motivation, and systems problem.
From green nudges to community-centred behavioural policy
The Retrofit Rocks project, developed in the British town of Coventry, explored how behavioural science can be combined with community engagement to address these barriers.
Coventry provides an important case study for the UK’s retrofit challenge. More than 22% of households in the city experience fuel poverty, and approximately 98,000 homes (around 69% of the housing stock) have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating below C. Improving these homes is therefore not only an environmental priority but also a question of fairness, health, and social inclusion.
Drawing on the COM-B model of behaviour change, we examined the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation factors influencing retrofit decisions.
Our findings highlight that motivation is often not the missing ingredient. Many residents understand the benefits of retrofit, including warmer homes, reduced energy bills, and lower carbon emissions. However, motivation alone is insufficient to drive action. Even when households recognise the benefits of retrofit, uncertainty around available funding, concerns about changes to their homes, limited technical knowledge, lack of trusted advice, and difficulties accessing support can prevent intentions from translating into behaviour.
This aligns with a growing movement in behavioural public policy towards approaches such as “nudge+”, where interventions move beyond influencing choices and instead create opportunities for reflection, agency, and participation.
Designing with communities rather than for communities
A central principle of Retrofit Rocks was that communities should not simply be the target of behavioural interventions, but they should help shape them.
Working with Coventry City Council, Act on Energy, local schools, residents, and community organisations, the project adopted a co-creation approach. Rather than beginning with the question, “How do we convince households to retrofit?”, we asked:
“What prevents people from engaging with retrofit, and what support would make action easier?”
Schools played a key role in this process. Children became “home energy detectives”, learning about energy efficiency and exploring how homes could become warmer, healthier, and more sustainable. Through creative activities, including designing future homes and developing retrofit models, children helped make an abstract policy challenge visible and accessible.
This approach recognised that environmental decisions are rarely made by isolated individuals. They happen within families, communities, and social networks. By engaging children, parents, teachers, and local organisations together, Retrofit Rocks created new spaces for conversations about energy efficiency.
Translating behavioural science into local impact
A key question for behavioural public policy is not only whether an intervention changes attitudes, but whether it creates pathways towards real-world action.
Across three Coventry communities, Retrofit Rocks actively engaged 180 (year 5) primary school pupils, 10 teachers, and 130 households. Community workshops connected residents directly with energy advisers (like E.ON, and Act on Energy), housing organisations (such as Citizens), and local authority support.
Figure 1: Community workshops in action
Source: author
These interactions translated into tangible outcomes by creating clearer pathways from awareness to action. Residents received personalised guidance, with 14 households referred to housing providers, energy advice services, and relevant support schemes. A further 15 households received immediate assistance on housing conditions and energy efficiency improvements, including advice on potential retrofit measures and available support.
A distinctive feature of Retrofit Rocks was the role of schools as trusted community intermediaries. Rather than treating households as isolated decision-makers, the project recognised that energy decisions are embedded within families and social networks. By engaging children, schools created an accessible entry point for conversations about retrofit, allowing information and ideas to flow between pupils, parents, teachers, and the wider community. In this way, schools acted not only as channels for communication but as part of the behavioural infrastructure needed to build trust, confidence, and collective capability around home energy improvements.
To better understand whether initial engagement translated into longer-term behaviour change, residents were invited to share their contact details to allow progress along the retrofit journey to be monitored over time; 22 households agreed to participate in this follow-up process. Following the community events, 18 households received support to implement retrofit measures.
This suggests that addressing capability and opportunity barriers (through trusted advice, local partnerships, and practical support) can help bridge the gap between residents’ interest in retrofit and concrete action.
The project also demonstrated wider engagement effects. Website views (on the page providing information about available retrofit grants) increased by approximately 2 to 4 times around key engagement dates with local community, with an average increase of around 3 times relative to baseline levels. This suggests that trusted, locally embedded interventions can extend beyond those directly participating.
Overall, these outcomes show that behavioural interventions should not only aim to change individual decisions but also strengthen the systems that enable decisions to happen.
Making retrofit visible, trusted, and possible
Behavioural science helps explain why retrofit remains difficult.
- Complexity creates inertia. When people face too many uncertain options, delaying the decision often feels easier than acting.
- Retrofit involves trust. Households need confidence that advice is independent, installers are reliable, and measures will genuinely improve their homes.
- Many retrofit benefits are invisible. Unlike visible environmental behaviours, such as recycling or electric vehicle ownership, insulation and energy improvements often happen behind closed doors. This limits opportunities for social learning and the creation of new norms.
Community approaches can help overcome these barriers by making retrofit more visible and socially shared.
The future of behavioural public policy: beyond individual behaviour change
The lesson from Retrofit Rocks is that achieving net zero requires more than persuading individuals to make greener choices.
As recent debates in behavioural public policy suggest, effective climate action requires combining individual-level insights (“i-frame” approaches) with wider system-level change (“s-frame” approaches). Behaviour happens within social, institutional, and economic environments, and policies must engage with these realities.
The future of retrofit policy should therefore not ask only:
“How do we change household behaviour?”
It should ask:
“How do we create systems that enable households and communities to change?”
The transition to net zero will depend on technologies, finance, and infrastructure. But it will also depend on trust, participation, and collective ownership.
Retrofit is not just about transforming homes. It is about working with the people who live in them.
For more information about the study, you can watch a short video on Retrofit Rocks here,and Visit the project webpage here.
Dr Lory Barile is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on behavioural and experimental economics, sustainability, energy efficiency and public policy. She leads Retrofit Rocks, a community-based initiative developed with local authorities, schools and energy organisations to improve understanding of home retrofit and support more inclusive approaches to the transition to low-carbon housing. See more on Lory’s research here.