Overview

Loco Home Retrofit CIC is a Glasgow-based social enterprise working to help households reduce carbon emissions from their homes. Founded in 2021, it addresses the climate crisis by making home energy retrofit more accessible, effective, and fair. Loco Home provides independent expert advice to homeowners, supports trusted local tradespeople, and runs community projects that promote collective climate action. Its work focuses on building trust, sharing knowledge, and strengthening the local retrofit supply chain to create a more sustainable, just, and low-carbon future for Greater Glasgow.

Gap the project addresses

We seek to harness civic capacity to accelerate decarbonisation by providing a focal point for grassroots cooperation. We act to complement and supplement public programmes.

Homeowners and tenants find decarbonisation retrofit difficult – it is complicated, risky and expensive. We promote consumer protection through our services, reducing the risk of regrets such as inappropriate measures, rogue traders, poor standards or misallocation of funds. This is a service not provided by public programmes outside of the fuel poverty programmes.

With respect to the critical shortage of skilled tradespeople required to retrofit almost all homes, we are focussed on supporting micro and SMEs that face barriers around the cost of accreditation, finding customers, business development. While public programmes focus on school leavers (apprenticeships and colleges), and large companies (public procurement), we aim to support additional routes into green jobs including mid-career changers and existing tradespeople who wish to add energy efficiency services to their business.

Ownership model

We are an asset locked social enterprise, a Community Interest Company limited by guarantee and constituted as multi-stakeholder cooperative. Our 315 members elect 6 non-executive directors. Most members are mostly ordinary householders motivated by their concern for climate or housing standards. A small minority are also motivated by their involvement with the retrofit sector through their work as tradespeople, architects, academics or civil servants. The CEO is the seventh and final director. He is employed by the board and is accountable to the members through the NEDs. The board may terminate his employment.

Therefore the organisation is owned by the cooperatives members.

Policy mechanisms

• The main source of funding in the first two years was the founders own personal savings/unpaid work.
• Most development has been supported by short term restricted grants including Scot Gov Climate Engagement Fund, Scottish Enterprise Innovation, Innovate UK. There has been limited unrestricted funding, the main item being £70k from William Grant Foundation.
• Homeowners benefit from Home Energy Scotland grants and loans, and the Energy Company Obligation

Impact to date

• 430 households have passed through the membership
• 230 households have received paid expert advice leveraging our advanced expertise in construction and heating.
• In the past 12 months, 60 customer households have completed decarbonisation retrofits with our support leading to 2880 tonnes of lifetime carbon savings.
• We have provided training and support to around 40 tradespeople.

Contribution to just transition

There will be no Just Transition without transition. There will be no social justice on a planet devasted by the use of fossil fuels due to an increasingly inhospitable climate, rising global food poverty, households and public authorities being overwhelmed by compounding climate-driven disasters and rising climate refugee movements. Therefore we are primarily concerned with ending the use of fossil fuels in homes in Greater Glasgow as soon as possible.

However we have several aims in our constitution (see ‘Ends’ here) that seek to promote justice through the transition.

Local heritage

Most of our customers are in pre-1919 houses and tenements which are key features of Glasgow’s built heritage. Our advice integrates the traditional methods and materials critical to preserving these buildings such as the use of lime-based mortars.

We recognise that gas engineers have the core skills required to install heat pumps and seek to support gas engineers to make the transition. For example, we work with heat pump engineers who are willing to take gas engineers ‘under their wing’ to build the portfolio they need for accreditation.

Benefits to the local area

We prioritise the principles of community wealth building including local ownership of the economy, local skills and local procurement. In these ways we seek to build a fairer economy and retain money invested in the decarbonisation in the local economy.

Lessons learned

There are many households willing to take action and spend significant sums to decarbonise their homes. These are often the people in the biggest and warmest homes, and are therefore among those that have made the greatest contribution to causing climate change. We think these people should receive some support for building the green supply chains, even though they do not make a financial return.

Similarly we are reluctant to see poor households be the first to retrofit as the skills around heat pumps and deep retrofit are not well developed. The least well off have the least ability to seek redress and absorb the consequences of bad retrofit.

Experienced tradespeople often need relatively little support to add retrofit to their services – such as joiners who add airtightness to their practice. However support needs to be comprehensive. Rather than just bootcamps and websites, tradespeople need skills + business model + customer introductions + peer support. We could do a lot more to build the green micro trades if we had some funding.

Constraints and challenges

• We need grant funding to develop our service and build the market.
• Tiny market. No government regulation. Inconsistent government messages to homeowners (eg cancelling emissions targets and scaling back the Heat in Buildings Bill)
• High cost of acquiring customers.
• Government support for single measures approaches which have an inherent risk of regrets. They should instead support whole home approaches based on independent, holistic expert advice such as ours.

 Working conditions and fair work practices

Featured organisations and initiatives were asked to supply the following information regarding working conditions:

• Alignment with Scottish Government Fair Work First criteria
• If they have gone beyond Fair Work First by incorporating broader values on fair work
• For larger organisations, whether a union recognition agreement is in place.

This did not apply to co-operatives structures and membership-based initiatives, though all projects and initiatives were given room to provide any detail on fair work practices deemed relevant.

The following information was provided:

• We are a cooperative and employees are members with an equal say on the direction of the cooperative.
• We have inclusive work place processes.
• We always pay above the real living wage.