From carbon strategy to community impact: SCAPE's Retrofit Credits journey

Our experience with Retrofit Credits has helped us test how a carbon strategy can deliver tangible benefits for communities, starting with the home. Below, John Logan, Director of Sustainability at SCAPE Group shares what we’ve learned so far, why social housing has been such a strong fit, and how we see this approach supporting the next phase of our environmental and social value ambitions.

Retrofit Credits are an independently verified social value and carbon credit, developed by HACT and PNZ Carbon, which enables organisations to invest in retrofit activity in social housing and measure the resulting social, environmental and economic outcomes to individuals who benefit from the works.

Sustainability is a rapidly expanding area of focus for SCAPE. Retrofit Credits now form a key part of our approach to carbon reduction and community impact providing a mechanism to invest in high-quality retrofit projects within social housing and, supporting for local authorities, strengthening environmental standards and improving outcomes for residents and clients across social housing.

Social value is a core priority for SCAPE. Beyond supporting local economies and skills, the organisation, through our frameworks, focuses on creating long-lasting community legacy projects, including improvements to shared spaces and neighbourhood infrastructure.

Retrofit Credits aligns closely with this ambition. We believe the home is central to people’s lives, and believe homes should be warm, healthy and comfortable. Supporting projects that improve energy efficiency and resilience allows SCAPE to deepen our impact and deliver tangible, place-based benefits for residents.

We undertook a pilot programme last year that was deliberately exploratory. Working with HACT, enabled SCAPE to understand how the Retrofit Credits model operates in practice, how the data is generated, and how it can align operationally with social housing delivery. It also produced place-specific insights that can be shared with our regional teams and framework delivery partners.

Across six projects in England and Scotland, SCAPE worked with 11 housing providers to deliver 12 different retrofit measures, ranging from insulation and glazing upgrades to low-carbon heating technologies such as air source heat pumps. Measures included:

• Boiler and electric storage heater replacement
• Loft, cavity wall, solid wall and underfloor insulation
• Double glazing and door replacement
• Ventilation improvements and heating controls
• Energy efficiency improvements to appliances

Social housing proved an excellent fit for the type of meaningful, long-term impact SCAPE is seeking to deliver. Improving homes delivers immediate benefits for residents’ comfort, health and wellbeing, while also contributing to wider community resilience and carbon reduction.

SCAPE trialled a 20% offset approach during the pilot year. And, while only an initial step, it demonstrated that Retrofit Credits can work technically, environmentally and socially within the organisation.

SCAPE’s own operational carbon footprint is relatively modest at around 450 tonnes per year. However, Arc Partnership, part of SCAPE Group and a joint venture company with Nottinghamshire County Council, generates approximately ten times that amount. Demonstrating that the model is robust at pilot scale provides confidence that it can be applied across the wider Group, and extended through SCAPE’s framework delivery partner network.

Crucially, the programme also produces robust, localised data that can be shared directly with our public sector clients to support evidence-based decision making.

Social value underpins everything SCAPE does. The organisation is a founding member of the National Social Value Taskforce and, in partnership with Social Value Portal, helped develop the Social Value TOM System.

Retrofit Credits sits within SCAPE’s Environmental Strategy and Carbon Reporting, particularly as the organisation shifts from net zero to carbon neutrality through high-quality insets.

We are now exploring how the learning and case studies from the six pilot projects can be shared with our regional teams, framework delivery partners and public sector clients to support wider adoption.

Yes. SCAPE is highly enthusiastic about the model and has already introduced it to key stakeholders across the Group. There are plans to actively promote the case studies across its contractor network.

By demonstrating that the partnership works and that the approach is technically robust, SCAPE expects more contractors to align with Retrofit Credits. The model supports both SCAPE’s carbon strategy requirements and its wider organisational ethos, with strong potential to scale across the sector.