Wates already looks after 10% of the nation’s social housing stock – approximately 50,000 homes. Last year it retrofitted just 857 of them to the energy performance level required to the government’s net zero by 2050 target. It needs to doing double that number.
While Wates, and companies like it, have their hands full sorting out public sector housing, there remains the question of how the 15 million owner-occupied homes (in England alone) are ever going to be net zero by 2050. Eoghan O’Lionaird says that this market is on his radar too.
“I wouldn’t at all discount the possibility of us participating at an individual household level,” he said in an interview with The Construction Index.
So could we see Wates, the company building a £500m gigafactory in Sunderland, coming round to 23 Acacia Avenue for a £5,000 heat pump contract? The way Eoghan O’Lionaird conveys it, if Wates doesn’t step in to save the day, who will?
The whole domestic decarbonisation challenge is a £100bn market, he says, adding: “There’s a vast amount of work that needs to be done. Somebody has got to grasp this nettle.”
In 2022, roughly 50% of Wates Group’s £1.9bn turnover came from its construction operations. Property services, of which the Wates Living Space housing maintenance business is only one component, brought in a quarter of the total. With the Living Space business looking to further exploit the opportunities of the retrofit market, this ratio is likely to shift in the coming years.
“The decarbonisation agenda is one we will continue to grasp,” he says.
Firstly, however, it requires a coherent strategy from government, he says, a long-term plan with cross-party support that can survive successive changes in government.
Not much sign of that yet.
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