Decarbonising social housing: why building archetypes hold the key

The need to decarbonise the UK’s social housing stock is well documented, with successive waves of funding made available by both the current government and its predecessor in a drive to achieve ambitious Net Zero targets. As a leading decarbonisation contractor, Novus is at the forefront of this drive – and we are working alongside our key partners to deliver the best solution for our clients.

One such partner is Design Specifics, a leader in PAS consultancy and design, which is pioneering a data-driven and technology-driven approach to social housing decarbonisation by ensuring that any interventions are tailored to the specific property types. At Novus, we have also worked extensively with Energy Specifics, sister company to Design Specifics, which specialises in energy efficiency building assessments and energy-saving upgrades.

Taking a bespoke approach to analysing properties played a key role in our successful delivery of a £1.6 million Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) Wave 1 retrofit programme for South Derbyshire District Council. The end-to-end programme covered 110 occupied properties and included our team supporting the client at every stage of the process – from application and assessments to design and installation. Novus took a comprehensive approach, working with our partners to utilise digital energy monitoring, thermal imaging, and 3D BIM to ensure accurate property assessments and tailored retrofit solutions.

Similarly, our award-winning work with Redditch Borough Council was delivered in collaboration with Energy Specifics and other key partners. Its capabilities for categorising and analysing housing stock enabled our specialist team to create a high quality, standout funding application for Redditch Borough Council, which subsequently became one of very few local authorities to secure digitisation funding.

Adopting a collaborative approach offers clear benefits to our clients – and we asked Design Specifics to explain how a bespoke approach and a deep understanding of building archetypes can benefit social housing providers and residents alike – and how that allows contractors like Novus to offer even better solutions to our customers.

Bespoke, not blanket, approach

Design Specifics advocates taking a bespoke approach to decarbonisation for social housing properties, rather than a blanket one-size-fits-all solution. Its ability to categorise and analyse housing stocks across a whole portfolio offers huge advantages for local and combined authorities, for housing associations, and for contractors like ourselves.

Understanding specific building archetypes is the key to this approach.

Housing associations often base funding applications on average property types—for example ‘mid terraced house’ or wall types such as ‘cavity wall’. However, this approach overlooks the significant variations between individual homes, even within the same development, which can lead to substantial cost differences.

For instance, when decarbonising houses on a single street, the cost variations and energy efficiency measures for an end terraced property can differ greatly from those of a mid-terrace home. Similarly, top-floor apartments may need roofing insulation, while first-floor units do not.

Data driven delivery

Design Specifics has created an enormous database of building archetypes from its work across the UK, which it draws on to inform the right interventions for decarbonisation. Covering over 100,000 primary archetypes, this database allows Design Specifics to automate archetyping, and identify the interventions required to achieve EPC C rating or Net Zero – with accurate costs too.

Explaining the process, Rudy Agnihotri, Director – Strategy and Innovation at Design Specifics, said: “By starting with a detailed insight into building archetypes, we are able to match the right solution to each particular property, which means that we can help contractors like Novus to cost projects much more accurately for their clients. But our data goes beyond building archetypes, allowing us to map damp and mould to archetypes, as well as align planned works and damp and mould works with decarbonisation. This provides a massive cost saving to housing associations, and minimises disruption to the tenants too.

“Using our in-house GIS tools, we’re able to identify key risks and site considerations—such as radon exposure, flood zones, rain exposure, conservation areas, listed building status, and planning constraints. These insights are factored in at the outset, before any interventions are proposed or costs are assigned.”

A collaborative approach to decarbonisation

The data on building archetypes, combined with the other data pools available through Design Specifics, means that we’re able to work smarter, focusing our efforts on the properties most in need of intervention and ensuring that the right solution is applied to the right property at the right time.

We’re proud to work closely with Design Specifics to ensure we’re providing our clients with the best possible service. This collaboration begins at bid development stage, where Design Specifics analyses client stock data—including property addresses, planned works, damp and mould records, and tenant profiles – and cross-references it with their datasets of archetypes, GIS layers, cost models, and available funding schemes.

The outcome is a suite of intuitive business intelligence dashboards and actionable insights that enable robust stock selection for retrofit programmes, while supporting the development of a data-driven, long-term asset management strategy. The company also supports us with providing relevant training for upskilling our colleagues through the Energy Specifics Academy, as part of our commitment to providing a specialised service for clients.

Commenting on the importance of the Design Specifics partnership, our Head of Sustain, Rebecca Hart, said: “Working with partners like Design Specifics allows us to offer a better, more tailored solution to our social housing clients, and their residents too.

“Rudy and his team are ideal partners for Novus: like us, they prioritise collaboration and joined up thinking to ensure that the funds available through schemes such as the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund are invested wisely and that the works we undertake will make this biggest impact for social housing residents.”