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Empowering regions for better homes? Devolved governance for warm, healthy and energy-efficient housing.

    Cohort 2026 PhD Project

    About The Project

    This PhD project will examine how the UK’s commitment to achieving a net zero economy by 2050, and the societal imperative to ensure healthy, warm and energy-efficient homes for all, intersect in the evolving context of English Devolution. Set against an evolving political backdrop and the promise of transferred powers from Whitehall, the project will investigate how Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) are working in partnership with local authorities across the newly established East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA), the regional retrofit supply chain, and a diverse range of community stakeholders, to develop and implement a shared housing retrofit strategy and associated actions across a range of tenures.   

     Collaborative partnerships, innovative funding and business models, and revised delivery mechanisms are critical to this agenda, given the past fifteen years of austerity governance, and previously failed housing retrofit programmes, which have damaged trust for consumers and the supply chain alike. However, there is currently insufficient knowledge and evidence as to how these new strategic local/regional partnerships and approaches will play out, and the extent to which regional and local actors can be empowered and work together to deliver improvements in housing and neighbourhoods at scale.  

     The project aims to identify and evaluate how devolved governance arrangements and decision-making processes inform regional retrofit strategy development, collaborative partnerships, and business and delivery models for housing retrofit, with a focus on Nottinghamshire and the East Midlands. Looking across the housing system, these programmes could include, ‘One Stop Shop’ services to link householders with trusted routes to finance and endorsed retrofit suppliers, formation of a Retrofit Suppliers Forum, and/or an action group for industry skills development.   

     To what degree do such partnership initiatives encourage resident engagement, create vibrant neighbourhoods, boost industry skills and competences, create local jobs, and help to sustain local economies? The project would take a mixed-methods, case study research approach and would be informed by comparative regional/local examples of best-practice.  

     This project has been co-created with and is supported by researchers from University of Nottingham, Nottingham Trent University and partners at Nottinghamshire County Council.

    Project Aims 

    The overall aims of the project are:     

    1. To analyse the implementation of this strategy and look to best practice further afield.     

    2. To investigate the intersections between English regional devolution and local/regional governance of scaled housing energy retrofit by strategic authorities and diverse partners.   

    Project Team