Part of: Regenerative Places

Local Area Retrofit Accelerator (LARA)

Our LARA initiative seeks to accelerate the retrofit revolution by helping local areas to break down barriers to retrofit.

At UKGBC, we’re taking steps to make every UK home carbon-free by supporting local communities in creating tailored retrofit strategies through our collaborative Local Area Retrofit Accelerator (LARA) initiative. The LARA pilots are being delivered by The MCS Foundation and supported by UKGBC, National Retrofit Hub and others. The pilot is funded by the MCS Foundation, Greater South East Net Zero Hub and the Aurora Trust.

What is LARA?

The Local Area Retrofit Accelerator (LARA) is a collaborative process working with stakeholders from the local retrofit system to co-create a Local Retrofit Strategy specifically designed for the intended area. LARA engages stakeholders from across the local retrofit system, such as local authorities, social landlords, training providers, community organisations and the supply chain, and agrees a vision in the principle of collaboration. By doing this, we believe more can be delivered and we can achieve better outcomes for all stakeholders covering health, fuel poverty and decarbonisation.

We work hand-in-hand with local areas across the UK, using co-design workshops and strategic working groups to help them craft bespoke retrofit strategies that address the unique challenges and opportunities of each region. By bringing together key stakeholders, we’re helping to ensure that these plans are both practical and impactful.

How does LARA work?

Shared Understanding

Build a shared understanding of the locality’s retrofit system through stakeholder mapping and assessment and systems mapping. Research into retrofit activity in the area to determine the current state of play from which the strategy can be built. This enables stakeholders to create a baseline from which they can determine how well the strategy is working.

Co-design

Through three workshops, the stakeholders agree the current situation, where they want to be (vision and outcomes), how they want to work together (principles) and how they’re going to get there (actions).

Review and Endorsement

The stakeholders are provided with a Local Retrofit Strategy developed in phases 1 and 2 for endorsement. This is a critical stage as the strategy needs to be adopted by the local retrofit systems stakeholders.

LARA resources

Facilitating Retrofit: a comprehensive sectoral analysis

Overview of current one-stop shops, supply chain growth & analysis, market development and finance mechanisms.

Download here

The ‘Getting Started’ Retrofit Toolkit

A guide for Local Authorities who want to set up ‘Retrofit Facilitation Services’ for households in their area.

Access here

The Retrofit Playbook

A resource to support local and combined authorities in developing retrofit policies and initiatives, through sharing best practice and guidance

Download here

Regenerative Places

Our programme utilises a place-based retrofit strategy to enhance local network capacity, strengthen resilience against future climate-related challenges, and deliver broad regenerative benefits to communities.
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