The national conversation about improving our homes often begins with technology and targets. But behind every upgraded boiler, insulated wall, or efficient window stands a person, a tradesperson whose knowledge, confidence and pride determine whether progress is real or rhetorical.

Across the UK, that workforce is shrinking. More than 80 per cent of those keeping Britain’s homes warm, safe and efficient are small or micro-businesses (On The Tools Installer Survey 2024), and most of their owners are over fifty (BMF /BMBI Labour Market Report 2024). New entrants are scarce, and the pathways that once attracted young people into building trades have thinned to a trickle (CITB Construction Skills Network Forecast 2025). The result is a quiet crisis: the capacity to repair, maintain and improve the nation’s housing stock is eroding just when demand is set to rise sharply.

It is tempting to describe this only as a “retrofit skills shortage”, but that framing is too narrow. The challenge is not a specialist niche that a short-term training scheme can fix. It is a structural gap in the everyday workforce that looks after our 29 million homes (DLUHC English Housing Survey 2023). If we treat decarbonisation as an add-on, we will forever be chasing a separate “green” workforce. The real opportunity is to make low-carbon know-how intrinsic to every competent installer, builder and engineer, so that decarbonisation simply becomes business-as-usual.

Through its membership and work with the Construction Leadership Council and the Construction Skills Mission Board, NHIC has been gathering evidence from right across the home-improvement sector. Our members, from merchants and manufacturers to accreditation bodies and consumer schemes, have contributed data showing where policy, perception and practical delivery fall out of step. The insight is consistent: the people already inside Britain’s homes are the key to scaling quality improvement and lowering carbon at pace, but they need coherent systems that respect their professionalism and reduce the friction of doing the right thing.

That principle sits at the heart of NHIC’s new Impact 2030 framework, built around the three Rs –Reduce, Respect and Rebuild.

-  Reduce poor practice, installation risk and consumer confusion by joining up standards, guidance and assurance.

   - Respect the workforce, recognising the craft, competence and community role of those who deliver improvement on the doorstep.

  - Rebuild public trust in the systems that govern quality, protection and performance.

When these values are applied to the skills agenda, they become practical levers for change.

Reducing complexity means aligning existing training, accreditation and funding routes so small businesses and sole traders can access them without bureaucracy. Respecting the workforce means paying attention to how work is specified, valued and rewarded, not just how it is certified. Rebuilding trust means closing the loop between consumer experience, installer feedback and policy design.

NHIC’s work with Innovate UK (Installer Insight 2025 Project) and the wider CSMB evidence programme is turning these ideas into tested models: roundtables with installers, evidence synthesis for policymakers, and collaborative projects that pilot new approaches to brokerage, onboarding and quality assurance. Each piece of research reinforces the same message: that the domestic repair and improvement workforce is the foundation of national resilience. If we strengthen that foundation, the carbon savings will follow naturally.

Decarbonising homes is not a separate industry. It is the next chapter in the long tradition of British home improvement. By embedding new knowledge into familiar trades, by valuing the people who already hold the keys to our housing stock, we can normalise change rather than continually reinvent it.

If we want to meet our environmental goals, we must first rebuild the systems of respect and trust that keep every tradesperson and every household invested in the outcome. Because the true measure of progress isn’t the number of homes retrofitted, it’s the number of professionals empowered to make better homes part of everyday practice.