City of York Council wins £3.5m Net Zero Living: Pathfinder funding

A local partnership group, led by City of York Council, has confirmed an award of £3,371,806 from Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living programme. 

The York project will create a Retrofit One-Stop-Shop to facilitate retrofitting homes with low-carbon measures, improve the householder experience and contribute to better energy efficiency standards across the city.

The programme - a £25 million package of support from Innovate UK to help councils tackle the barriers to climate action projects, speed up their progress to net zero, share expertise and unlock investment opportunities worth up to £500 billon - is designed to help local authorities across the UK to accelerate net zero in local communities.

As part of Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living programme seven local authorities will receive Innovate UK funding of between £2 million and £5 million to run practical demonstrator projects. 

The project, which aims to eliminate barriers to retrofitting properties with carbon reduction measures will involve engagement with residents, creating ‘deep retrofit’ demonstrator homes, developing supply chain skills and ways to match approved suppliers and products to needs, and exploring innovative financing methods.

City of York Council’s partners are Brightsparks Agency, Energy Systems Catapult, the University of York, York Community Energy CBS, Wrapt Homes, Abundance Investment and North Yorkshire Council

The Future Ready programme will focus particularly on five areas most important for net zero progress:

• visioning and citizen engagement
• planning
• finance and investment
• data
• policy and regulation

Beyond technical help, it will create a strong community of practice across the UK as the councils work together, generating insights, sharing learning, helping each other and coming up with new solutions.

Councillor Kate Ravilious, Joint Executive Member for Environment and Climate Emergency, said, 

“In our new Council Plan, 'One City, for all’ we have been absolutely clear about tackling climate emergency as one of our four core commitments to the people of York and, as part of that, we made a clear promise to insulate homes . 

“This is a huge step towards delivering that promise, with key partners, in a way that keeps us on course to meet our ambition for York to be net zero carbon by 2030, as well as delivering better homes and improving the City economy. This is an important milestone, and my thanks go to all those involved in making this happen.”

James Farrar, COO for the York & North Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership and Director of Transition for the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority said,

‘This project comes as the result of the brilliant collaboration between our local authorities and our team at the LEP. With devolution we’re seeing increased investment from the government into the Net Zero agenda in York and North Yorkshire, with over £10m of funds committed at the formation of the Combined Authority, anticipated early in 2024.

‘This project enables far greater public- private sector and B2B collaboration, something that will be critical to unlocking the economic opportunities to be found in scaling up a one-stop shop approach to Retrofit across the whole of York and North Yorkshire.’

YCE Director Jonny Stokeld, said,

"This is a big step forward for the city, lending a huge heft to our efforts to tackle carbon emissions from York's houses. It will enable York Community Energy to scale up our existing home retrofit assessment services, and help support householders to engage with contractors and get the work done. We urgently need to tackle our climate impact whilst reducing bills and keeping our homes warm, and we're delighted to be working with the City of York Council and other partners to help achieve this."