Move with the times

Grosvenor says England’s three million listed buildings and properties in conservation areas are being held back from basic energy efficiency upgrades.

Despite rising energy costs, intensifying heatwaves and extreme weather, owners of listed buildings must currently apply for consent to undertake even basic efficiency improvements. Research from Grosvenor shows that local authorities spend around 4,000 working days each year processing Listed Building Consent applications for low-risk retrofit measures, such as secondary glazing, insulation and heat pumps. Around 93% of these applications are approved, yet only one in three are determined in the required eight-week timeframe. This slows down work that would cut carbon emissions, improve energy performance and help protect the nation’s heritage for future generations.

The complexity of the existing system is highlighted by only 16% of local authority officers feeling very confident making decisions on heritage retrofit, while 87% of historic building owners see the planning system as a major barrier to adapting their properties.

Without reform, Grosvenor warns, historic buildings risk falling into disuse, undermining both their heritage value and the delivery of the government’s Warm Homes Plan. By contrast, enabling retrofit of heritage buildings at scale could generate around £35bn in economic output each year across the UK and support 205,000 workers.

The Warm Homes Plan

In January 2026, the UK government launched its £15bn Warm Homes Plan to help millions of people find ways to save money on energy bills (such as solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and insulation) and transform the UK’s ageing building stock into comfortable, low-carbon homes that are fit for the future.

The framework covers the UK (complementing specific schemes already in place, such as Warm Homes Nest in Wales, Warmer Homes Scotland and Northern Ireland Affordable Warmth). However, heavily funded home upgrades are primarily available in England where the government is seeking to unleash a ‘rooftop revolution’ by providing a government-backed zero- and low-interest loans programme to get solar panels onto the nation’s rooftops. Additional new rules mean every new home will come with solar panels by default.

Tor Burrows, Chief Sustainability Officer at Grosvenor, says the plan is “a very welcome £15bn commitment to tackling the climate crisis”, yet she notes that England’s three million listed buildings and properties in conservation areas are held back from basic energy efficiency upgrades, even where approval is almost guaranteed.

There are three major problems: inconsistent rules, complexity (when local authorities have little confidence interpreting them, building owners have even less chance) and the speed with which the process takes place. It means that building owners have few options – either continue to pay crippling costs for inefficient buildings, or enter a lengthy, complex and costly process of approval for basic retrofit measures that aren’t at odds with the heritage. With an existing system that isn’t facilitating the protection of these buildings, it seems the biggest risk to heritage is the protection system itself.

Modern-day heritage planning

Independent analysis shows that retrofitting historic buildings across England and Wales could cut operational carbon emissions by up to 7.7 MtCO₂ annually – equivalent to around 30% of the annual emissions reductions required to meet the UK’s Sixth Carbon Budget.

Grosvenor argues that reforming England’s planning system is the most immediate lever available to begin unlocking this potential at scale. Its report Retrofit or Ruin recommends the government:

• introduces a National Listed Building Consent Order for listed buildings, granting automatic consent for low-risk, high-benefit retrofit measures
• creates a national model Local Development Order to streamline planning permission for energy efficiency works in conservation areas and geographies with high proportions of listed buildings
• launches a Heritage Capacity and Skills Programme, building on Historic England’s existing training programmes to ensure every local authority has access to qualified conservation expertise; and
• advances proposed reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework, which frames retrofit as essential to the long-term sustainability of designated heritage assets.

What is important to make clear is that Grosvenor’s proposals aren’t radical; they utilise existing tools to streamline the approval system in alignment with Historic England’s identified low-impact measures (and consequently Historic England has made its support known for a national Listed Building Consent Order, which is the headline recommendation in the Retrofit or Ruin report).

Burrows says: “Historic buildings only survive if they can adapt. If they are cold, expensive to run and difficult to upgrade, they risk falling into disuse. Once that happens, heritage is lost. The real issue now is speed and scale. Retrofitting historic buildings needs to happen across millions of buildings, not slowly, one application at a time.”

Addressing the skills gap

Unnecessarily restrictive planning rules aren’t the only issue however. In 2023 Grosvenor, Peabody, Historic England, the National Trust and The Crown Estate collaborated to highlight the skills and training challenges that will need to be overcome to ensure the UK’s historic buildings contribute to a net-zero future.

Heritage and Carbon: Addressing the Skills Gap identified a need for 205,000 workers to focus solely on retrofitting historic buildings, every year from now until 2050, to meet the UK’s net-zero targets. This is more than double the number of workers the UK currently has with the necessary skills. The report made the following recommendations:

• the government should work with industry to package together skills, training, funding, standards and advice into a National Retrofit Strategy. Within this strategy help must be made available to support the training necessary to improve the energy efficiency of the country’s historic built environment
• the government and the BSI should work with the heritage sector to review the training available for the construction sector and ensure knowledge of effective retrofit of modern and traditional buildings is appropriately covered, widely available and encouraged
• more Local Skills Improvement Plans should be in place, with the government continuing to resource training providers and colleges to provide retrofit training in line with the needs of local employers
• area-based schemes should be supported, as these are an effective way to build local demand and create pipelines that provide local retrofit businesses with the certainty they need to build capacity; and
• the government should make the apprenticeship levy funding more flexible by allowing unspent funds to be used to improve the reach and delivery of existing retrofit qualifications in the supply chain.

Heritage buildings represent the UK’s rich cultural and historic legacy, and future-proofing them by making them more energy efficient will also generate economic output and jobs. As Burrows says: “While local authorities undoubtedly face significant resource constraints, a system that requires individual approvals for low-risk, routine retrofit interventions that are almost always approved but takes months to do so, is no longer protecting heritage.” 

Read Grosvenor’s Retrofit or Ruin report at b.link/Grosvenor_retrofit
Read Heritage and Carbon: Addressing the Skills Gap at b.link/Grosvenor_heritage
See the Warm Homes Plan at b.link/GOV_WHPlan

Image credit | Thomas Graham