During the onstage Q&A with the SLT on the day, we didn’t have time to respond to all the questions you raised during the roundtable sessions. As promised, please find answers to these below.
- Sharon Johnson
Q&A
Yes! We have made tremendous progress this year, laying the foundations for working in a market which has evolved significantly.
Financially we’ve addressed the need to change our organisation and reduce our costs, and we’re now a profitable business again. We have milestones coming up which will see our new systems go live with all the benefits they bring.
We have a great set of capabilities that set us aside from the competition:
- We’re experts in the retrofit market, unlike some other big competitors who are more generalist
- We have proven capability at delivering for our clients, as demonstrated by government statistics
- We have our LEAP team who are experts in supporting households with complex needs or who are struggling financially
We still have a lot of adapting to do to meet the slightly different flavours of government support under the Warm Homes Plan (details of these are yet to become fully clear) but the hard stuff is largely done.
The plan I showed at AgilityFest included the ‘base case’ which accounts for delays in government decisions and bumps in the road/other risks, and it still shows strong growth so is an attractive case. Beyond that, there is a much wider runway of work that we can secure.
A key part of our growth is in expanding into new geographies and increasing the amount of retrofit work we can do ourselves, rather than relying on third parties. As a result, we are actively hiring and exploring expansion into regions adjacent to Bury St Edmunds – where the pipeline of work we’ve secured gives us a lot of confidence that we can keep everyone very busy for the foreseeable future.
While there are no plans to do another major restructure like the one at the start of 2026, we can’t confirm that there will be no further changes, given that the business has to continue adapting and growing. We’ll keep monitoring how the structure is working and keep listening to your feedback, to make sure we set ourselves up for success.
Technical Design & Assurance.
Our Local Authority work is mainly delivered through Warm Homes: Local Grant and is therefore generally focused on identifying and supporting eligible private households.
A key difference is that lead generation can be undertaken by the local authority or led by us, followed by the survey, design and installation journey for each individual property.
Our Social Housing work is procured through similar competitive or framework processes, but delivery usually starts with a landlord’s planned programme of properties, rather than us being required to generate individual customer leads.
The scope of work also tends to be broader and more repetitive across property types. Alongside energy efficiency measures, programmes may include enabling works, remediation, and damp and mould treatments. Commercial models vary – some operate similarly to WH:LG (one property at a time) while others are based on schedules of rates, valuations or measured works, such as Cambridge City Council.
Winning this work therefore requires us to demonstrate not only technical and installation capability, but also the capacity to deliver repeatable programmes at scale, manage wider property condition issues and work effectively with residents and housing management teams.