Engaging the Owner-Occupier Homeowner (Rotarian) towards a Net Zero future - attitudes, motivations, barriers and misconceptions of energy efficiency retrofit.
To meet the UK’s legally binding obligations for Net Zero, deep and universal cuts to domestic housing stock emissions are required. Whilst certain sectors are regulated for, the owner-occupier market remains free to act as they will. Owner-occupiers make up 64.3% of all tenures and 54.1% of those are owned-outright. They are the largest single sector of UK housing and whom this work is focused upon. Diverse housing stock combined with a disengaged and on-average older owner-occupier leaves this market struggling to achieve traction. This work aims to identify a better way to engage and subsequently motivate this group by greater understanding of their motivations and barriers and how Governance Entities (policy makers), Delivery Entities (SMEs) support them, the Decision-Making Entity (outright owner-occupier). The work was carried out with the participation of members of East Midlands Rotary Clubs due to their close demographic match to the government data of a typical outright owner-occupier. The work was completed following a mixed method inductive research technique. This allowed the owner-occupiers’ practical experiences, beliefs, drivers, barriers and concerns for the future to be investigated. Key research findings show that only 23% of those surveyed felt they had the practical ability to enact a new energy efficiency project in their home. Secondly, 56% were disinclined to act due to belief of limited financial returns and no other benefits being perceived. Age was a factor in decision-making on payback time and the results indicate that key changes to decision-making processes occurred through ageing, meaning the average owner-occupier is much less likely to be able to make good affective decisions that involved perceived risk. This directly affects purchasing decisions around new technologies such as air source heat pumps. Finally, contrary to government opinion on who typically makes spending decisions (males), two thirds of energy efficiency upgrade decisions are either made jointly (63.3%) as a male and female couple, around one in ten (11.4%) by solely by women and only a quarter (25.3%) solely by men. The research found that neither the government nor Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) were trusted messengers and the issue of getting value for money using an SME loomed large in the home-owner’s mind. In conclusion there is real opportunity to achieve significant carbon reduction in this area; government needs to motivate people with personal benefits, unlock long-term suitable finance packages, treat outright owner occupiers as an age-specific group and find suitable trusted messengers they will engage with whilst also seeking to support SMEs in this area.
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