Inside Housing reports that Wave 2.1 of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund — an £800m programme launched in September 2022 to fit around 94,000 social homes in England with energy upgrades — had completed roughly 27% of those retrofits as of June 2026.

It is easy to read that as simple government failure. Having worked on the assessment end of funded retrofit, we think the more useful reading is about sequencing, and it applies directly to anyone planning work on their own home.

Why funded retrofit runs slow

Three things consistently eat the timeline, and none of them is the installation itself:

  • Assessment and design come first, and properly. Work delivered under PAS 2035 needs a retrofit assessment, a coordinator, and a medium-term improvement plan before anyone touches a wall. That is a feature rather than a delay — it is what stops external wall insulation being fitted to a damp solid wall.
  • Access. Occupied homes need resident agreement, appointments and repeat visits. Programmes built around void properties move faster and there are never enough voids.
  • Skilled people. There are not enough retrofit coordinators, assessors and installers with the right certifications. This is the same shortage that has now pushed back EPC reform itself.

The lesson for a private homeowner

If a well-funded national programme with dedicated delivery partners takes years, the informal version — deciding in October that you would like a warmer house by Christmas — is not going to work either.

What does work is doing the diagnosis early and out of season. Get the assessment done, find out what your property actually needs and in what order, then buy the work when installers are quiet rather than when everyone is cold. Fabric first is not a slogan; it is the order that keeps the later measures working.

The practical version

An EPC tells you where you stand and what the software recommends. A retrofit assessment tells you what the building can actually take, in what sequence, and where the moisture risk sits. They answer different questions and the second is the one that prevents expensive mistakes.

The social housing sector is running into these constraints first because it is trying to do the work at scale. Private owners get to learn from it for free — but only if they start before the deadline rather than after it.