A landmark moment for retrofit delivery in the UK
What started as an innovative GovTech collaboration between Novoville and Birmingham City Council has now become a region-wide rollout across the West Midlands, following Shared Works’ landmark procurement by the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA).
Across the UK, councils and housing providers are constantly delivering multiple retrofit schemes at once. These programs (BUS, HUG, ECO, and the latest, Warm Homes…) often involve different delivery partners, funding rules, and reporting requirements. Data sits in different systems, and progress is difficult to track consistently.
This lack of data integration comes at a high cost to the sector as a whole.
- Contractors and housing providers lose tens of thousands of hours revisiting and re-surveying homes, only to discard data after use for lack of a system to store and share it with the next user.
- Retrofit schemes are complex to deliver and risky because no one has a full picture of a home’s construction, energy performance, or upgrade history (this issue has recently been highlighted at a national level following a poor level of compliance with PAS2035 throughout the ECO programme).
- For residents, all this results in poor communication, confusion, delays, and leaves them without a clear understanding of what is happening to their home.
Shared Works was developed to address this gap for all groups involved in delivering retrofit works, from council to resident, and through the whole installer and surveyor supply chain.
Starting in Birmingham, scaling up to the West Midlands
Shared Works began through Birmingham City Council’s participation in the Connected Places Catapult DIATOMIC Accelerator. The aim of the project was to test whether a single digital platform could support the delivery of ECO & GBIS, while meeting the day-to-day needs of council teams, contractors, and residents.
The Birmingham pilot focused on three core challenges
- Bringing delivery data into one platform
- Improving visibility of progress metrics across teams and partners
- Giving residents clear, accessible information about the works taking place in their homes
The pilot proved that it was possible to support local authorities, contractors, and residents through a single integrated system, rather than as separate processes.
The experience in Birmingham highlighted a wider opportunity as the Warm Homes programme was announced. Many of the same challenges existed across the region, with councils and housing associations working under similar pressures but largely in parallel, struggling with limited coordination and inconsistent data.
WMCA Retrofit Programmes
Through its “Integrated Settlement” with DESNZ, allowing funding to be spent in a devolved manner by the Combined Authority itself, WMCA brings together multiple funding streams into a single, multi-year framework for delivering net zero and Warm Homes outcomes. This includes the Building Retrofit Pilot (BRP), supporting place-based retrofit delivery including Warm Homes Local Grant and Social Housing Fund, and the Local Net Zero Accelerator (LNZA), focused on building project pipelines and investment readiness. While this approach gives welcome local flexibility on spending, it also increases the complexity of coordinating activity, data and reporting across local authorities and delivery partners. WMCA needed a simple, shared way to manage these programmes and maintain a clear view of progress and outcomes, which led to the adoption of Shared Works as the common digital infrastructure for delivery.
One platform, three different needs
Data from councils and housing associations are integrated in one place, including smart meter data where available. Reporting is consolidated, reducing the time spent by local authorities, housing providers and the Combined Authority on manual data collection, large monthly spreadsheet returns, and follow-up requests.
Contractors only need to integrate with Shared Works, but many are choosing to adopt it as their job management platform.
For residents, a dedicated portal provides clear information about what work is planned, what stage it is at, and what their next steps are, along with community-designed educational content. This improves transparency and supports better engagement in what can otherwise be a complex and unfamiliar process.
In short…
In recognition of the importance of delivering retrofit at scale while protecting the public purse and in confidence in local authorities’ ability to harness homegrown innovation, WMCA has now procured Shared Works to support delivery of the Warm Homes Programme and the Local Net Zero Accelerator across 7 councils and 22 housing associations.
For the first time, delivery data from across the region will sit in a single platform, bringing local authorities, contractors, and residents together in one integrated system.
This is a significant step forward. It demonstrates how a solution developed in response to a local authority challenge can scale to meet wider regional needs, filling gaps to improve the retrofit sector as a whole.
Looking to the future
Other combined authorities have already been in touch to explore how Shared Works could support their own programmes. If you are a council, combined authority or housing organisation facing similar challenges and would like to learn more about Shared Works, please contact Louis at [email protected] or Ciera at [email protected].
