#63 - David Pierpoint: Quality Over Quantity. Why Proper Training Transforms Our Building Environment

David Pierpoint discusses how skills and training are key to improving quality in our built environment, drawing from his 15 years of experience developing the retrofit sector through The Retrofit Academy.

• Industry struggles with consistent quality in both retrofit and ventilation sectors
• Government funding often focuses on single measures rather than holistic retrofit
• Ventilation frequently missing from retrofit measures lists despite being essential
• Professional accountability distinguishes quality outcomes from poor practice
• Retrofit coordinators serve a critical role as advocates for homeowners and landlords
• Building inspection rates of only 2% are insufficient to ensure quality outcomes
• Training must evolve beyond certification to lifelong learning and ongoing support
• Technical knowledge needs to be accessible through technology and community platforms
• Diversity in the sector remains a challenge despite women excelling in key roles
• Future of training involves blending online learning with practical experience

The Retrofit Academy trains retrofitters to the highest standard possible and then provides them with a lifelong learning journey through community support, resources, and continuous development.

David Pierpoint - Linkedin

Retrofit Academy

Chapters

• 0:12 Introduction to Air Quality Matters
• 1:55 Meeting David Pierpoint and Retrofit Academy
• 8:37 Evolution of Retrofit in the UK
• 17:10 Quality Challenges in Retrofit Programs
• 28:38 The Role of Retrofit Coordinators
• 36:18 Consumer Protection and Policing Issues
• 49:14 Professionalism vs. Poor Practice
• 59:47 Skills Training and Lifelong Learning
• 1:09:17 Future of Retrofit Education

Transcript

Simon: 0:00

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters, and I believe we already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with David Pierpoint, ceo and founder of the Retrofit Academy. Skills and training, it seems, is a universal challenge in the built environment and none more so than in retrofit, a sector that requires a diverse range of skills and experience and knowledge to deliver the outcomes we desire. I've known David for what I think now is coming up to 15 years and you won't find a more passionate and knowledgeable person in the sector about driving skills and training around retrofit. In the Retrofit Academy, I believe he's created a top-drawer organisation and, as he puts it, driven to deliver the very best training they can day-to-day. So, as we look to improve ventilation and air quality in the built environment, I think there's a lot we can learn from David and the experience they've had developing skills and training in the retrofit sector. I'm recording live from the FutureBuild conference this week where, in fact, the Retrofit Academy, as it does every year, is hosting the Retrofit Conference as part of FutureBuild. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet. This is a conversation with David Pitpoint.

Simon: 1:58

I think it's fair to say Retrofit has had its challenges, whether it's quality or skills and training, because it's such a a broad mix of things. You need to get retrofit right labor, actually getting people building, getting people interested in that sector. What's fascinating to me about retrofit sector from your perspective is I see such analogies with ventilation and where it's at particularly perhaps maybe even 10 or 15, 20 years ago, where we don't really know the words, but you know that the the sector. There isn't a trade for it. You don't go to college to learn to be a ventilation person.

Simon: 2:41

It falls somewhere between trades. Nobody really understands the language. Every time we look at it and I mean every time we look at it we see wholesale failures to even get close to minimum standards. People are being real, people are being affected by poor outcomes and you've been in this space for like how long now? 15 or so years, yeah, I lose cap. Something must have triggered with you back 15 years ago that made you think you could bring something to the table here to pull this together. I'm guessing you must have, you must have seen something similar in it that there was this disparate group of trades and skills challenges and labor challenges.

David: 3:27

There's something, there was there yeah, well, yeah, right, so I was more than 15 years ago. I was an events organizer. Yeah, it's like the show we're out here, um, big built environment shows and retro. This is interesting. Actually, retrofit was one of the coming themes 15 years ago. Yeah, so that's honest. That's what, why it came to my attention. It was an opportunity, you know, an area that we could develop in a show or a conference program, and, in fact, I organized the uk's first retrofit expo in 2012.

David: 3:59

I think it was really so, so well, you know that, that don't get me wrong. I mean, I, put as an individual, I had two. I had two real interests. One, it was always been the desire to do something with life that's going to lead to a positive legacy, if you like, at some point. I mean, I couldn't be a uh, you know, I couldn't. I just couldn't do something that I didn't feel had a positive impact on. Yeah, I wouldn't get out of bed every morning, um. And the other interest I had was around skills and people. Um, and I, you know, I was on a board of a national skills academy which was looking at environmental technology, so, so that was an interest, um, and so, actually, retrofit, does you know, it was such a broad challenge and such a blank canvas. Um, as you say, it has all these different facets and aspects and someone needs to do something about these things. And back in those days, of course, we had this thing called the green deal. Yeah, of course the coalition government's like next big thing, um, and we thought it was going to get big quick.

David: 5:02

And it's a number I hate. I can't wait for never to have to use it again. It's 27 million homes, 27 million homes to be retrofitted, because I remember the very first time I ever saw that number presented it was actually the conference session at EcoBuild. I think it was back in those days. Must have been in 2008, 2009. It was a classic. How many times have we used this road? 27? Must have been in 2008, 2009. It was a classic. How many times have we used this road? 27 million homes to retrofit in X years? And at that time it would have been close to 40 years, I guess. And now it's still 27 million homes, but it's 25 years. Yeah, so it's. The scale of the challenge is what is attractive to people like me, who like to fiddle with things and try and make things better. Yeah, I mean, I suppose there's somebody in to people like me who like to fiddle with things and try and make things better.

Simon: 5:46

Yeah, I mean, I suppose there's somebody in a government department sitting there somewhere you know, doing a back-of-the-back calculation saying, right, got to reduce carbon emissions by X, this is our existing stock. Right, if we do this to half of it, that'll get us to where we're at. So you come up with these big numbers and you know the UK is not alone in that. You know most European countries at some point in the last 15 or 20 years have come up with ridiculous numbers of retrofit and largely we're still looking back and numbers are manipulated. It's probably an unfair word, but certainly what you find is big numbers of homes get hit. But we found all of a sudden it was single measures and not retrofit.

David: 6:34

And we're still doing way too much of that stuff, way too much. And, annoyingly, a lot of those programs are now called retrofit programs and they're not. So you know, know, have we spent money wise? You know, to be fair, let's think about this earlier, but the government's invested an awful lot of money into this set and all I might. It might get criticized for it not being enough, and I'm talking about blue governments as well as red governments, because, yeah, so when I started it was a red government, then it's to blue, blue and yellow and and now it's red again, but they've all pretty consistently invested. Whether they've invested in the right things, probably not, but certainly measures-based programs are. I mean, how many um measures lists have we seen over the years where ventilation, which you want to talk to me about, isn't included? Yeah, how can you have a retrofit program that doesn't ventilate? It's crazy, right?

Simon: 7:29

yeah, and I don't know. I suppose to some level, it's a safe bet if you're a government, because, while you do invest a lot of money into it, it generates jobs or revenue or products, you know, regardless of how successful technically it is, it's, it has a. It has an economic impact to some degree, doesn't it?

David: 7:49

it has a potential yeah, to be a massive economic benefit, but it generally isn't. Yeah, um, and it's because the money is invested into, mainly into sectors we've which are very short-term thinking, short--term business plans. They don't have a business plan at all and the opportunity is maximize the government funding, get as much as you can, play the system, oh, and then, you know, close down before it's too late.

Simon: 8:16

Yeah, the proverbial instant fire.

David: 8:21

Yeah, and that is not a sector we should be investing in and it's all too clear to see. It's all too clear to see Late I'mhaw will come on to some of those things, whereas when you invest in doing philoconic or whole house retrofit or quality retrofit and scale and you're working with actors who are committed to seeing it through whether they're social landlords or contractors, consultants, local authorities that's eminently investable. But we haven't historically put enough money into that sector. We are just about to see the first. You know huge, you know eye-watering solar fuel art for a long time 1.2 billion pounds into the wall of Homesborough. There's a lot of money. With the match that comes from landlords, we're taking more money and that is an opportunity we can't waste. We can't throw that away on doing more. Frankly, swear on your podcast, of course you can. You can't throw that money, you can't throw the opportunity away on the crap. Yeah.

Simon: 9:23

And you know not to do the sex down and that's not the point of this, but I I think it's interesting to see where it's come from and particularly I'm interested in talking to you about the lessons learned. But we have come a long way, there's no doubt about it, and I think you see that in the kind of money that's been invested in. If you look at what we have now, with the likes of the Retrofit Academy and skills and training, it's a country mile from where we were and we're at the point where financial institutions are betting with it when it comes to lower rates of loans, and we're seeing that in many jurisdictions around Europe that there's enough of a confidence in that sector. We can get it to the point where it becomes a safe bet if done right. So you know, I think you know it's good to start from that point.

Simon: 10:14

We have actually come quite a long way, but going back to well, I suppose when I first met you, which was 15 years ago or so, I guess, which was back in core days, we weren't there and I guess we were just in and around. We're just about to start the bond field review and each home counts and that kind of period. Wasn't it before then, really?

David: 10:34

yeah, so it was. It was very much that green deal. You know, it was the last time a government minister greg barker, bless him he put his head up up the parapet and tried to lead a uh, you know, a big, very bold initiative and that was really exciting. But the problem with a great deal and the government realized it within a couple years, irrespective of all the interest rates and the the reasons that people didn't take it up, I mean, it's it's, it's a relief with hindsight that it wasn't taken up more widely, because the quality of the work that would have been carried out under that program would have been far too low and we'd have been industrializing a lot of bad practice. What didn't exist and only exists to an extent now is good practice, yeah Right.

David: 11:19

So you know, you think about all the stuff we've done over the years. All this you know you've been involved in, I've been involved in, there's been an awful lot around, you know. Let's get more funding into the sector or let's get people skilled up, and that's important. I'm not going to say that's important, but until those people are doing the right things in the right order, we don't get good outcomes. And we've done enough retrofit or energy efficiency, or whatever we want to call it.

Simon: 11:47

To know it's better not to do it, that's hauled and stew it badly and I'm thinking back to those conferences from the core days the center of refurbishment excellence, I think it was, and it was the point of that, I suppose, was that there were people that knew what good looked like Right and knew how this jigsaw piece fitted together.

Simon: 12:15

Bearing in mind this was before Paz, this was before Bumfield Review there were people forging a path that could get good outcomes. I remember some of the presentations of some of the London historical buildings and so on, like complex retrofit projects that people knew how to do. A small scale, a small scale, and so that's what's interesting for me is that when we look at it from a ventilation perspective I look out into the wild at the ventilation it feels to me a bit like back then that there are people that know how to do this at small scale. Yeah, it's being done at big scale quite poorly and we know that every time we look at it, we we see we unearth the poor outcomes. So we've kind of got to get from this point of champions, pioneers that know how to stitch this stuff together holistically, to a point where we're building up scale um, and that that's an interesting journey, isn't it?

David: 13:16

it is. I mean, that's what my organization's best known for it's not all we do now, but it's what we're best known for is training, retrofit, core analysis and the course we put together for them started it back in the core days. We take this on a whole different level. Now was very much about taking all that knowledge in the heads of those people that you're talking about people who had been doing those ball scale and turning that into the course that would create mini me's. You know mini dens, they were yourdens.

Simon: 13:42

They were your Peter Rickabys and your Neil Mays and those kind of characters, I suppose.

David: 13:47

Well, certainly, peter Neil wasn't particularly involved, god bless, god rest him. But there were lots of them Bob Pruitt, mark Elkton or John Willoughby Obviously you're bringing back some memories here. These aren't some of these people I haven't seen in many years. But yeah, I, I mean they have a huge amount of knowledge but in in reality, and they'd peter. We still work very closely with peter and colin king and a number of others now, colin, of course, yeah, yeah, that they they'd not done it at scale. Okay, so writing the textbook, the textbook to deliver high quality, one-off, deep retrofit is completely different from the manual to do that across a thousand properties in 18 months yeah um, and and that's so.

David: 14:30

It's not just that practice aren't established, so good practice isn't embedded in what everybody does yet it's actually that most of it hasn't been worked out yet or it hasn't been done before, so so that that has been um. I mean, I feel like that's the drum I've been banging for most of the last 15 years. Um, and it's that's mainly what the academy does. It tries to give people um the opportunity to learn from all those people who have done it before, but also work together and collaboratively with just launched a trade association which is very much focused on practice to figure out the chair learning so that everyone can do this better, because we've got to do it best.

Simon: 15:15

Yeah, I mean I remember Neil May saying when he was writing the white paper around moisture risk in buildings so I can't remember if it was in it or it was just a conversation at time blurs things but he was describing how, when you're writing something to describe best practice, the reality is you're never going to face all of the examples that are likely to be faced out there. But what you've got to be able to do is create a toolkit for people, a resource that they know how to reference and get to when they come across a junction they've not seen before, come across a wall build up. That's unusual. That's the skill and the challenge. It isn't about covering all the bases. It's about creating mechanisms for people to be able to reach in and get to the right decision. And if you're scaling, I guess that's incredibly important, because you're never going to have 10 000 peter rick is out there micromanaging a retrofit project that you've got to create a structure that enables people to know how to manage that risk in some way yes, it's.

David: 16:17

You know you started off talking about the construction industry to build a buyer and sector and all you know I mean it is famously. Then, on my words, there was other people use that over the last 25 years in the sector I picked, I'd be a conservative cautious. Yeah, doesn't embrace technology. You know I mean whatever sabbing. I know there are examples, but the set does. But you know it's 2025 and answers to problems are in your foe. They're on youtube that you can get them off.

Simon: 16:48

Chad gbt you know it's not um it's not locked into decades of apprenticeship work. I think you know someone was describing this to me the other day with with the construction sector that the construction sector is a sector that's moved in decades, if not half centuries. Generally, technically it's moved with subtle changes in the environment or new building products or ways of working, and that tended to occur in 20, 30 years. But if you kind of look back at how our buildings evolved over the last couple of centuries, that seems to be the way it is. But you look at the construction sector now and it's almost every three to five years that the sector's moving so fast with new materials, new understanding, that it's quite a burden on that sector. But, as you say, we have access to information in a way that we've we never had before, that those skills would have only ever been learned by serving your time in an organization. And, yeah, you'd learn by what you saw.

David: 17:53

Yeah, maybe from a few books or what I'm saying, trying to say I'm clearly not saying it very well is it's perfectly possible to get a huge amount of information across to a large number of people in this age? Yeah, if you can marry, you know, genuine technical good practice with ways of communicating and ways of sharing it, um, and that's, you know, that's what we're trying to do. When you it's all about core and core, we had no assets. I had a building that was wonderful and I miss it, but you know, it wasn't particularly an asset to what we were actually trying to do, which was, I think the retro was build an army of competent retrofitters, you know. You know, compare and contrast that to net to now, and a lot's changed technologically in that time as well.

David: 18:35

In terms of what you can do with digital education, I'm sitting here with you in your film studio. You couldn't have done this 15 years. No, in terms of apps, you know, we, we, god, I would have been terrified as someone that said we should build a retrofit academy app, probably five years ago now, and he's down, just what you do. It's perfectly possible to do it, um, and yet, yeah, you know. So I mean, uh, yeah, we trained a thousand people to some extent, and I think the single biggest learning we've had in doing that is that stopping and starting doesn't work right.

David: 19:12

Those people and there's good and bad, it's right, but those people are the ones who want to do it properly do not need to stop learning. They never need to stop there. They are. They're on a lifelong learning journey. Um, and most of what they learn, need to learn, actually isn't. With respect to peter, there is a limit to what's in his head. There's a lot with his head, but there are limits. It's what we don't know yet. Yeah, so so it's all the stuff we, we, you know you've. You've got your first social hazard decarbonisation fund programmes just coming to an end, just winding down, there's been a lot of good retrofit done. You'll see our awards tomorrow night. There's been a lot of good retrofit done. Let's find out how that was done and let's figure out what worked and what didn't from those things and then let's get all that information across to all these people.

Simon: 20:05

Yes, it's the only way that it's perfectly possible to do it as it started with you to some degree that there was a sense that there was some kind of technical coordination role need. It was the idea of a retrofit coordinator there before just the paths yeah kind of structured it to some degree. Yeah, you were kind of thinking somebody needs a kind of a what was it in your head at the time Like a project management type role.

David: 20:33

It didn't come from my head. I can't take credit for that. There was the chap widely accredited as coming up with the term retrofit coordinator. This bloke called Bob Pruitt Robert Pruitt, who's one of the UK's leading retrofit architects and a very good friend. He was working with Peter Rickerby on writing some guides that came out of something called the Retrofit for the Future programme. Do you remember that?

Simon: 20:58

I know the name, I can't say or call it turn of the last decade, turn of the 2010s.

David: 21:05

Basically, it was a challenge to see how low you could get the energy, the residual, the heat demand and all that sort of stuff from deep retrofits funded by what was them in technology Stratagia, dora, and one of the learnings that they took away from the program Bob was leading one of those, I think Peter Ledzer was leading one of those. I think then peter led so um was that you really need one person in charge of a project that knows everything that's going on. It's very much project management, uh, and bob laid that role out in a in one of his guides. You can still find it, I think it's on our website somewhere.

David: 21:36

This guy um and designed a role that that you know. He played that role effectively. He's from an architectural back. You know not much. He doesn't know about doing it, um. So it was sort of when we first came up with it and then what brought it, and there were a few others who said like let's get hold of that and turn it into something, and the idea was very much that we'd be training other architects, building surveyors, construction professionals to diversify into into retrofit. Yeah, take on that role.

Simon: 22:09

The reality has been a little different, I know and it's it's turned into I mean, I guess, because of the way that these things are standardized a bit of a risk management role as well. The risk plays very heavily in a lot of how it's structured. Was there some of that back then as well? This, this kind of managing risk, seeing retrofit through the risk lens, I suppose it's called the course retrofit, coordination and risk management.

David: 22:37

Oh okay, so for day one, when you and because the risks that you know people are talking about right now, as if they're learning it for the first time, are exactly the same. They're just a larger scale man. So so, um, yeah, so risk management is is crucial, but I mean, really the driver was, and it's absolutely right unless, unless you got somebody, an individual who knows what they're doing, in charge of a project and has got the homeowners back or the landlords back, and their driver is not the value engineering or the protecting the margin or specifying a particular product, it just does not work unless you have that independent, knowledgeable person. That's what the PAS did. It really took on the structure of the role that we'd worked up, and there's a clause in the PASM which says their job is to protect the interests of the homeowner or the landlord.

Simon: 23:40

And I think that's really often missed point of the retrofit coordinator is that advocacy role, that your job is the advocate for the tenant or for the homeowner or for the landlord. It's that.

David: 23:55

It's even more than that. It's to protect their interests. Yeah, it's to ensure that they get what they're spending their money on, even if it's free money from the government. Yeah, because I mean, look, there are um recent example of it's been in the news, many people would have seen it, you know an external wall insulation project in luton that has failed to catastrophic level. Um led to an individual family living in an appalling situation for far too long, with not enough support provided to get it right. And there are exactly the same risks, and retrofit coordinators revolved in that. That's people not doing their job properly. If they were doing their job properly, they would not allow things like that to happen, and they're not managing those risks.

Simon: 24:46

How do we get there? How do we get to the point where we have these large-scale poor outcomes? Is it just a failure of accountability and responsibility? Do you think Because we should know enough not to get there at this stage, shouldn't we? At this point in time, those issues are bloated. Because we should know enough not to get there at this stage, shouldn't we really?

David: 25:06

At this point in time, those issues are believed to be fairly prevalent in what you might call the eco sector, the energy company obligation sector and the GPS sector, which are really the sectors in which they're quite installer-led and they're quite measures-based. So they're not, by design, meant to be that. In reality they probably are. This is the world that gave us a lot of loft insulation, a lot of cavity fills, a lot of individual, a lot of boiler rip basements, that kind of thing. So fuel poverty schemes, don't be afraid.

David: 25:46

And trying to change that sector by saying, well, we've got a standard now which says you have to do it differently. So, if you like, you're retrofitting an entire sector is a real, that's a really. That's harder than starting from scratch with a new sector. We say, well, this doesn't exist yet we're going to invest in building up a whole new set of companies, whole new set of skills, whole new set of people. No, don't think around, that's hard too, but I don't think it's as hard as trying to change the culture and change the outlook of an entire sector and thousands of people who've been working in it for years, decades, doing things.

Simon: 26:22

You know the way they think yeah, and the built environment, whether we like it or not, progresses, often through a series of single measures I hate to use the word but a series of processes. Often, you know, there there is retrofit, holistic retrofit, deep retrofit there's a whole number of terms depending on which part of europe you're in. But that idea that you have a goal for a building and holistically you move it from A to B and you have a coordinator who's responsible for that, is having incremental improvements the whole time from a whole range of different angles, whether it's maintenance, reactive maintenance plan, maintenance, renovation, as opposed to retrofit. There can be a number of different ways. Buildings progress and I think that the challenge has always been in that sector.

Simon: 27:20

Where you have companies that specialize in one thing. Where you have companies that specialize in one thing, scale is the game, you know, and they just want to bash out cavity insulation or loft insulation or solar panels or whatever. The whatever, perhaps the market is driving at the time. Often as well. There's usually a, there's usually a market force behind a lot of this.

David: 27:40

Momentum isn't there it's going to be complicated. There are lots of factors which lead to those outcomes. Yeah, partly, uh, people not doing their job properly. It's partly value engineering. Uh, it's partly well, the design of the funding schemes in the first place and it's partly about policing, because in a sector that's got a bad track record, let's face it, parts of our setting mentioned a bond field review in each of them counts. We know it's got a bad track record, let's face it, parts of our setting mentioned a Bonfield review in each of them counts. We know it's got troubled history. So, and that's why the policing's so important and it's not been good enough. Yeah, it's not been anywhere near good enough. Neither has the consumer address, you know. I remember when Paz came out. I remember writing a slide and saying the best thing about paz 2035 and each home camps means that no one is going to be left hanging again. Whatever the problem that this system is going to get put right and it hasn't been.

David: 28:38

There are far and I you know I, I hope, I very much hope that the problems aren't as widespread as I fear they might be.

Simon: 29:06

And as part of that I remember talking to somebody back counts effectively is the body that provides the consumer protection and some of the policies that these big organisations insulation organisations, ventilation organisations, the component parts of the industry, I suppose but it was an existing organization that happened to be a vehicle at the time. I wonder, if you were writing, writing it from scratch would it look like, would the policing mechanism look like a trust mark if you could do it over again? Or you didn't have it? Have it there as a vehicle ready to go? Can it ever provide the kind of policing that's needed to really protect consumers? That's the question.

David: 29:57

So my personal view on that would be I think they've done their absolute best in almost impossible circumstances. Yeah, they did lack technical expertise and they've always been resource constrained. Yeah, and the only way, in my view, that this can be done properly is for a properly funded government agency. Um where?

Simon: 30:18

because that looks like building control or something else, do you think?

David: 30:22

a lot. I don't think it is building control so it's, but it's similar, you know it's regulated, it's independent um of all interests other than the government's priorities, because the problem would problem would trust mark have had is they had a limited amount of funding and then their business plan so I understand it today was very much. Well, you know it's it's the volume of lodgements that you know going to generate income for the organization which is going to allow you to employ more people, and so so you've got a a bit of a uh paradox there. You know you want, you've got an organization there whose job it is is to ensure quality outcomes being funded, if you like, by volume.

Simon: 31:06

Yeah, is that is a difficult question to manage and their only stick is with the umbrella organizations that manage those particular trades. So they're one step removed from policing to some degree. They, you know their ability to enforce is only really on the organizations that are members of trustmark, not on the individuals that are members of Trustmark, not on the individuals that are conducting the work. And I think that perhaps is one of the greater challenges is that you can't respond directly to a complaint in the same way if you can't talk and redress with those particular trades. That's a challenge.

David: 31:43

There was a theme at the recent Department for Energy Security Net Zero Select Committee that was looking at a bloomin' program. You know you've got. I mean, trustmark would have liked to have. Finding out for them is quite difficult because they're one step removed from that. And then acting is quite difficult because that has to be for various complicated reasons that went above my head. Somewhat has to be done by certain organizations in a certain way, but when you're the homeowner with the mushrooms from on the wall, I don't think you care. That's why I need that. Yeah, so, um, as you, you mentioned earlier to me that you're going to be interviewing a few other people, um, this this week, and some of those people work for some of those schemes. If, if you like, they're in the middle, yeah, between Trust, marlin and Consumers. You're not there. I mean, from my perspective, I've been singularly unimpressed by those accreditation schemes, those guarantee agencies. Almost. There are exceptions, but not many.

Simon: 32:44

Well, I mean, I can speak from personal experience on the ventilation side of stuff. People do a competency course for ventilation. It's two days long. I went and did one out of interest one day Half a dozen of the people that turned up the smoking pot for most of the day and were just there for a day out.

Simon: 33:03

It's designed to pass. It's designed to pass and so in no way could you possibly describe anybody leaving that two-day course as competent to any stretch. And then you're never policed again after that moment, from that moment onwards, unless your organization in the case of, I think and somebody will correct me if I'm wrong under nicic, which is the electrical one of the electrical trade bodies um, they do have an internal policing kind of uh auditing process, but that tends to only happen on the electrical side of those organizations, not on the ventilation. So in theory, the entire ventilation skill set that's within that umbrella of trust mark is out in the wild, never to be looked at again. And that was the question I was going to ask you is there any mechanism in the uk as it stands today where a third party, anybody, is going to turn up at a retrofit job and have a look at what's going on?

David: 34:12

well they are now, because a good kind of. I think they said that every ewi project that was delivered under eco or g bins needs to go be visited and audited, but that's closing the stable door at the shard bolting and the audit. I'm not an expert in this area, but I believe the typical audit rate was 2% or thereabouts and presumably those 2% were showing up issues In the. I remember very clearly in 2013, ofgem published figures which said that let me get this right 13% of all external wall insulation projects had type A fails. That was presumably under recode back in those days. It might have been CERT, ces. 30%, where things lead to dangerous outcomes either things falling off and hitting people on the head, potentially, or mushrooms growing out of the wall types At 13%. And then we put an audit regime which said well, let's just take a look at a couple of percent.

David: 35:21

So, yeah, no is your answer. And you speak to Colin King about this. You know, when he was the whistleblower essentially on board practice last decade, he was saying exactly the same thing. There's no such thing as a proper site audit.

Simon: 35:58

However, and this is the key thing, yes, you can swear on this podcast those you know, quite frankly, clusterfucks and everything in between. What do you think manifestly separates those from the people that are going to be rightly celebrated? Just one word, it's professionalism.

David: 36:15

They go about things in a professional way. You know standards. You know they're great, aren't they the companies we work with? Whether they're architectural practices or surveyors or tier ones, tier twos, they don't need a standard to tell them how to do things properly. They're in two inch ones, probably for decades. That's a minimum. A standard is a minimum, and yet you've got another set, and we've spent too long today talking about the cowboys, frankly, yeah, but um, you know there's another sector for whom you know they would look at that and they would laugh at it and never going, and and and the fag packet approach prevails.

David: 36:54

They may, annoyingly, and this is where trustmaker had an opportunity to, uh, gather data. Was it to be a data warehouse, which there is, though? That was an opportunity for all projects to be logged and, for the first time ever, hands, which there is, though that was an opportunity for all projects to be logged and, for the first time ever, we'd help. There would be visibility on data, which will be telling us how things were working, what was working, where the failure points, what are the trends, what the patterns, and I hear that we're going to find out more about this this week, which is good news, but it's been far too taking far too long yeah, and under under powers there was a.

Simon: 37:28

Certainly under pathway bnc there's a degree of monitoring as well, or was for certain complexities? Do we, will we see that data? Do you think, effectively the actual, actual outcomes?

David: 37:41

well, you feel for an assessor that's done it properly. Yeah, you know, in mind those contractors are working in communities with a social land board or a local authority as a partner who wants to know that the money that's been spent has brought the outcomes. They're looking at it quite good at procuring those sorts of things and there will be very widespread resident engagement and resident feedback and evaluation, and snags and defects will be. I'm sure there are flies in the ointment but generally speaking they'll be put right, whereas you know what you call that evaluation there in the eco sector, I mean, we really had to push very hard to get like a basic survey being mandatory and you can bet your bottom dollar there and this is the world of lead generation and all that sort of stuff. You can bet your bottom dollar. The evaluation is, you know, is a fill in that form and you know it's not at all how passwords design.

Simon: 38:44

And that's a problem we have across the built environment is it's one of the few manufacturing processes that doesn't have a great deal of feedback loops. You know, we we tend to send our product off into the wild without really much feedback about performance and expectations and delights and all of the things that if you were manufacturing cars almost anything else you were going to be all over.

David: 39:10

But somehow we're not there in well, no, I keep stressing, we're going to keep doing it. There is a sector that's doing all of that stuff and they're doing it really well. Yeah, so you know, come to come to the show. You know, you can go to the conference, you can visit the exhibitors, you can. Um, we've got our new as mentioned earlier, our trade association, the association of retrofit consultants. Now, these are people who deliver fantastic programs, fantastic outcomes.

Simon: 39:35

Uh, all the time I'll have you back in just a minute. I just want to borrow you briefly to talk to you about 21 degrees, a partner of the podcast, formerly the green building store. They were founded in 1995 by three exceptional building professionals and the company grew out of their frustration with the poor availability of ecological building products, and I've known them for years as the go-to company in the UK for end-to-end design-led MVHR systems. You see, your home should do far more than just provide shelter and be energy efficient. If designed correctly, it'll be a far healthier and more comfortable environment. So whether you just want to start with a single product solution or need a comprehensive range of technologies to make your home more comfortable, 21 degrees can help. In 21 degrees you won't find a more trustworthy, straight-talking, passionate about what they do and approachable group of people. I speak a lot about the performance gap on this podcast and what we can achieve if we value ventilation highly enough. 21 degrees embodies that sentiment for me. So if you're building a home, looking to install ventilation or need to talk to experts in the field, I can't recommend them highly enough. Links are in the show notes at airqualitymattersnet and you can find them at 21degreescom. That's 21degreescom. Now back to thereescom. Now back to the podcast. Here's a question for you.

Simon: 41:10

One of the things that I often had conversation with over the last 10 or 15 years has been the progression of passive house as a standard right and one of the accusations I often in fact I I did a talk maybe 10 years ago about what I thought was wrong with passive house. I was one of those. You know those talks you do where you come along as the contrarian, deliberately, um. But one of the points I was making back then and there is some truth to it and that is when you're at a pioneering stage and you've got organizations that deeply care about the product that they're producing, you have this group of people highly dedicated to a good outcome, and you can take that so far at a scale, you can build so far, but at some point that idea has to find its way into the wild, to the parts of the sector I'm not saying that don't care, but don't care as much that are practically just trying to get by day to day delivering what they're supposed to do. It's not, it's not necessarily forced on them, but they find themselves with this approach that they they have to deliver to, as opposed to people that have bought into it in their blood.

Simon: 42:22

Right and passive house has struggled with that that year for years, transitioning from scale where you might have a block of apartments or a small little multi-story or something, to genuine scale, and it looks like now we're just starting to cross that Rubicon. There are larger scale developers that are now going. Well, to be frank, we're so close to it now it're only going to take a few tweaks and we're effectively passive house. Do you think Retrofit could find that challenge, in the sense that at the moment it's still being led by champions, and are you starting to see the others starting to be in the sector and deliver quality outcomes? I'm not an expert in passive downs.

David: 43:11

That's a way back. Sure, I know it's a face there.

Simon: 43:14

But yeah, I think you get what I mean I do yeah. I mean.

David: 43:17

Again, look at the companies who are delivering what they call retrofit programs or decolonization programs. The names you've heard of know mears, weights, sustainable building services, equans, osborne. You know they are large contracting firms. I don't know who's delivering passive payments at scale, if I'm honest, but you know that there are. There are significant businesses who've seen a significant opportunity and made a significant investment into it. So I'm not sure that the scale thing is as much a problem actually as it might be. I mean, you know I'm not an expert in U-Build at all, but the equivalent of course Enerfits.

David: 44:00

On the retrofits side there is moderate take-up off. I mean, the programs we're delivering, even through the better quality schemes in socialising and localism, that stuff, aren't delivering to any fear. They're only a fraction. I don't know what the number would be, but it'd be a tiny percentage. Yeah, and there is certainly an issue about a lack of clarity around the standard we should be setting. Part of the reason for that is that we look to the government to set a standard and they're not the right people to do it. So we've got to figure that out for ourselves and I don't think the standard that industry comes up with will be approaching nf it? I don't think that's the issue.

David: 44:43

The issue is what is the optimum investment into a property that you can make at a given point in time? It is not always going to be do it all, spend the £80,000. For a lot of properties it's not going to be anything like it or not. We're going to be installing a lot of heat pumps. Where it's inevitable the heat pump is going to be installed, we've got to do something about improving the quality of the fabric to the extent that that heat pump can be effective. That's not anything like any of it standard stuff. But the danger is that you can make Again you install a heat pump in a building that's not been improved to. The fabric isn't to the whatever the coefficient of performance level that they agree is the right one, um then? Um then you're just costing those people more money and their energy bills are going to go up yeah, and interestingly so.

David: 45:38

I don't believe in top-down standards. Um, I think the industry has got to come together and set that standard and then provide supply chain and manufacturers with certainty that that is the trajectory yeah, and that consistency has always been the big challenge.

Simon: 45:54

Multi-annual funding consistency, I mean consistency is important to everybody, not just consistency of training and what's happening from the government. But everybody's got to back back this thing and so they need to know it's not just here this year and next year, but it's here five and six years um one of the.

David: 46:12

I know only the government can do that. Yes, by the way, that unfortunately that's going to lend the money.

Simon: 46:17

Yeah, for now and of course, we live in a world where, over these five and six year cycles, we we have other existential crises that have an impact in that make up and shape and flavour of retrofit, depending on fuel costs and energy crises, and we've started to learn more about embodied carbons. That adds a complexity. You know the sector's evolving as well, so what might work now might be subtly different or quite different in five years time you know, isn't it just?

Simon: 46:51

yeah, I mean, one of the one of the things I was going to ask you, which is which I find fascinating because again it gets me thinking with my training head on about ventilation is partly because of the standards, but also out of. We've also seen the development of not only the importance of a retrofit coordinator role but a retrofit designer, a retrofit assessor, etc. Clearly, there are specialisms within the theme that people bring certain skills to the party to deliver it well, and ventilation is no exception. You know, we see the same here. Someone that may be good on site project managing it perhaps has no place being a ventilation designer. That's a particular skill that you need to lean on those people, and likewise, somebody going in and assessing a building may be subtly different in some way. Um, if you could have a well-trained somebody but could only pick one, which one of those three would you prefer to have? A retrofit designer, a retrofit coordinator? Yeah, um, well, I'd rather have a retrofit designer.

David: 48:08

A retrofit assessor's job is to collect some data and carry out a survey to a decent standard, which we still seem to struggle with. But it is that simple. I think the optimum it's a bit of a trick answer to your question the optimum would be a retrofit designer who's also a coordinator. Um, but if I, you know, if money were no object, who would I want? You know, is it? I mean, if you're going to spend 50, 60 000 quid on your property of any time, you know, with extension, or you know, new door windows, whatever, you wouldn't think twice about getting an architect. Of course you would, you know. You know, I mean, that's just the way it's always been done. And yet, when we come to energy efficiency, which is quite complicated, you know, as rickby always says, it's not rocket science but it is challenging. Yeah, you know you, you, we think, well, how cheaply, how cheaply can we get this done, and and and, and you know what's the least. You know you, we think, well, how cheaply, how cheaply can we get this done, and and, and you know what's the least. You know we, we got to um, you've got to get to a point. I mean the other challenge we have these excellent designers and excellent coordinators that we've got is making their services affordable to the, to the general public. That's the other side of it, and and the companies that provide those services well are too small at the minute and too in demand. And frankly, if you, if you throw out the challenge of the average 12 million, I think we've got owner-occupied homes. It might be more than that. You know, these people aren't going to go very so. You don't always have the luxury of who you might want, but if I had to choose one at the minute and I was going to spend proper money, I'd absolutely want the designer. It's interesting.

David: 49:52

We've learned a lot. We developed a rhetoric designer course about 12 months ago and what we've learned about that individual is their job isn't often to be the architectural drawing type person, it's to be the manager of others who are doing design. So with ventilation, generally speaking, the design comes from the systems manufacturer, um, the manufacturer of the system, and that's right. But joining all those things together, because it's then we're not doing many restaurants, but all we're doing is sticking in an extract fan. Oh, you know, they're part of a much wider project. So bringing all those things together and coordinating them. So I like the designer-led, designer-coordinated goal. I think that's, yeah, that's it, but you know you get to integrate all the design and all the delivery at the same time integrate all the design and all the delivery at the same time.

Simon: 50:49

And um, yeah, I have some insight on the ventilation design element of your course, because I was involved in it. And um, it's interesting. I would agree with you. It's that it's not necessarily designing the nuts and bolts, it's knowing enough about it to know what good looks like when it comes across your desk or not, and how it stitches in with the rest of the retrofit. That's the challenge, isn't it? So who, who, who are the kind of people that are making good retrofit designers? Are they, are they the architects traditionally, or are you finding a different mix of people? That, I think, I think compare and contrast.

David: 51:26

You know, we there are people training to be a retrofit coordinator who are domestic energy assessor and have done a five day course and previously were where nothing to do with buildings. Um, uh, and might become a retrofit assessor, which is, if you do it with the right trading organization, just another couple more days, completely different than ours, I'd say. But those people are not going to be as skilled or knowledgeable as an architect or a construction manager or a surveyor who's been through four or five years of professional education, and then all we're doing with them, with the courses that we're providing with those people is, is adding to their knowledge and helping them to apply it in a an environment of context that are less pervading. Yeah, so. So of course those people are, are better, and if money were no object, everyone would want one.

Simon: 52:21

Um, but it is so is it an in-demand trade at the moment?

David: 52:27

the retrofit designer well, there's far too few. I mean it's, it's pleasing. Whenever we do the retrofit academy awards we always guess I mean we've had, we've doubled the number of entries every year. I think we've run it and a new set of organizations and people put themselves forward and that's always really good that's great.

David: 52:45

It's not the same old, same old there are many of them are very, very good, but there's always new firms being set up. In this professional services space in particular, there's quite a lot of new firms that are set up people who've left a bigger practice and set up on their own. So I think there is a there's a really good grouping of of people. Um, it's not diverse enough. That's definitely an issue. We're not bringing enough people who aren't like the glade man into the set to get.

Simon: 53:18

That's definitely something we used to do more about but that's always been the challenge in construction generally is the diversity, for sure, but particularly in retrofit, I think it's uniquely suited to diversity because this is a people's homes, you know, it's a. It's a very odd blend of service, stroke, construction, retrofit. That would suit broader diversity, wouldn't it?

David: 53:43

yes, yeah, I. So if you put me on the spot and ask me to name my top five retrospect coordinators, which I'm not going to do, but I could have- especially coming out to an awards yeah, it would be at least two or three women in that, and that as a proportion of, I think we trained about 3 000 retrospect coordinators.

David: 54:02

You know I don't know the exact numbers, but you know that is not in proportion to, so so that tells you. Yeah, I think of our last, uh, I think two of our last three retrospect coordinators in the year have also been in the fairer sets.

Simon: 54:17

Yeah, which may tell you so well, I mean I was I was only thinking about this the other day that when you think about our sector broadly and actually I'm not talking about ventilation here, I'm talking about the built environment more broadly, both scientific, academic and construction related there are unbelievable standout women in that sector that you would put on an equal, if not higher than a lot of the men in the sector. So there's no excuse for it. I mean that it clearly suits a diverse grouping without any question, because I'm as likely to name a woman as I am a man for for a standout person in any one of the areas. We're really lucky, I think, in that sector, people I really look up to across the board, yet at scale it's not there, is it? I know that's a difficult problem.

David: 55:19

Well, funnily enough, one of the working briefs we set up with this new association, arc it's called Association of Retrofit Consultants. Arc is to look at diversity in the professions. And you know, because, tell you now, when we convened ARC and we pulled together all the companies that wanted to be part of it, we looked around and there wasn't a single woman in it. And that's just because they're the people who are running those companies, um, and there's quite complicated reasons why, um, you know, there's the, there's the barriers aren't there to success in life.

David: 55:58

Sometimes just being female, unfortunately in a, in the society in which we live, is enough because you, you know, you, you stop, often stop and have kids, you know, and your confidence can sometimes be not. I've seen that firsthand. I don't need to generalize. I've seen that happen. A number of people, um, whereas the man charges on and tends to be the entrepreneur, undergatherer type, there's, there's a bit of that culturally, uh, yeah, but but you know, there's no question about it in terms of um competence and suitability, particularly for retrofit coordination and design yeah there's amazing, amazing within who you know.

Simon: 56:36

We just need more yeah, yeah, to break, break through that glass ceiling. And I know I've had many conversations over the years, as you have, of women in the sector facing blatant misogyny in meetings and just shithousery, which which is not great but what other perspective on that?

David: 56:56

okay, so we um, there were recently a list of retrofit coordinators had been struck off by drossmar and the list of installers have been struck off. And we did. We looked in into our database, found out who we knew from those businesses and who had been struck off. Not one of them's female. Now again, I don't want to, you know, draw too many conclusions from that, but but if we're and there may well be something in the you know, would a woman walk away and leave people in that situation? Based on that limited amount of evidence, all I've got to go, one of them in it.

Simon: 57:36

No, they wouldn't yeah, and I think that that professional, professional element to it can't be underestimated. And we see this in ventilation all the time. I was doing some developing a retrofit practitioner type course over in ireland recently and we had the first dry run and we were doing the usual show of horrors, of images of how not to do it and you know, there was just that sense of somebody walked away from that, thinking my job's done. And you can't buy that how somebody can walk away from jobs half done, thinking that's okay, that's a hard one to engineer, isn't it?

David: 58:23

Yeah, it is. The reality is it's probably because their boss tells them they have to yeah, in the majority of cases. But that's where, with that regific coordinator role, we drill it into them and there's no one can say we don't teach them this, you know, because it's ran down their throat. You know they are there to protect the interests of the customer, so they have to. They have to be in a position to stand up to that boss who's saying you know, whatever, go on to the next one. They have to be and that's their job, it's their professional responsibility, they're professionally accountable. And that's why it's wrong in my book that there's way too many people who clearly lack the skills and experience who have been trained up by some, frankly, very shady organizations, and it's all very reductionist and that's clearly not the direction we need to go in and what makes the Retrofit Academy different?

Simon: 59:19

If I was to ask you to describe the Retrofit Academy to someone who's never heard of it before, how would you describe what you do?

David: 59:29

today. Oh, we train retrofitters to the highest standard we possibly can and then we provide them with a lifelong learning journey and, as I mentioned earlier, you can't just do a course and then go off and do. We're figuring it out as we go, yeah, so so you know, we have, I think, now a very good set of foundation level courses but, as I say, as practice emerges and all this additional, the huge reservoir of knowledge that gets built up, because that needs to continue to be fed in. So we, we, we set up a mechanism to do that for a professional membership, so that that people, through the events that we organize, the clubs, the forums, the, you know, the guidance that we write, the community website that we build, all that sort of stuff, they can access that, that sort of that, that learning, so that they won't make the same mistakes that other people had in the past yeah, I think that's really powerful and I think it speaks to something you said earlier about that.

Simon: 1:00:29

Do we really think a two-day course and a set of powerpoint presentations and a pdf you take home with you it's going to cut it in 2025? It's just not the way we access information and learn anymore, is it?

David: 1:00:42

no, it's not. But you know there, there are a lot of companies out there at the minute who are quite prepared, and the regulators allow it to train someone to be a dea in three days and two days later to be a retrofit assessor. It is absolute, can I swear now? Wow, well, it's box, isn't it? Yeah, and and and. Loads of those people. It's not the individual's fault. They're told that's okay, they might be looking for the cheapest option. I understand that, um, but you know how we're meant to provide competent people after our days training to do anything I don't know.

Simon: 1:01:22

So and competence. Competency I I think I struggle with the word competency and we have this in ireland as well, where I've been developing some stuff and it makes me uneasy. Competency, because we're not teaching competency. I don't think we're. We're teaching people the skills to navigate a complex world, a complex environment.

Simon: 1:01:49

You don't come out of anything competent. You come out with the skills to manage risk and assess your environment in a way that you get good outcomes and to know who to ask and how to access the right information when you do and it was that lovely thing around that as designed, theoretical and as built in service kind of idea that if you're a new build it's a different game because you'll have 38 type a buildings on a construction site and 52 type b's and it's a rinse and repeat. So you, you become competent at one process and you can very well just rattle that out for hundreds and hundreds of properties. It's a completely different environment and there's no expectations. There's no context and there's no expectations. You're not dealing with someone's home, but in the world of retrofit, no matter how much you train people, within a week they're going to be facing a situation where they don't have the tools currently to to navigate that and they need to know, they need to have some processes and some structure to reach into, isn't it?

David: 1:03:03

yeah, that's yeah, so that's why we call it lifelong. It's not just learning, it's lifelong support. There's way too much money for old rope in our sector and what I mean by that is pay your accreditation fee because that gets you Trustmark accredited. Well, that's not the point. The point of paying those fees is to get ongoing should be to get the right ongoing support that you need, the software that you need to help you do the job properly and the access to the technical backup that everyone's, because actually what? It's not just different from that new build example, it's as different as it can be. The reality is that individual stood on in front of that problem is probably the first person who's ever faced that particular problem to some degree, because every house is different and every climate is different, and you know that's Russell about that one. So you know we can't leave these people unsupported and out on a limb on their own and unfortunately, over the last five or six years, that is exactly what I think has happened.

David: 1:04:07

Yeah you know, money for old rope. Yeah right, great, yeah. So we need a far more professional approach. We need, you know, effectively, these are new professions. We started acting far more like a professional body, if I'm honest, than we ever thought we would do, um, and we got these tiered memberships which give people a pathway through those professions and to move between them, just as you would as an architect or construction manager. There is a combination of experience and evidence that you need to build up to say yeah and a phenomenal amount of resources.

Simon: 1:04:40

It should be said as well for people that haven't accessed the retrofit academy website and the the information that's and the libraries of stuff that's there. There's some phenomenal knowledge. There is a lot buried in there. Yeah, we've been doing it for a long time.

David: 1:04:56

Yeah, we built up a few things and we, you know, we've, we've, we've, we employ five people full-time whose job it is is to create, author and produce that content. So you know we are. But again, you know, unfortunately the realities for my business are we compete against others who don't do any of that. You know there's this maps of horror stories around training and, yeah, and it's not just like they say, ventilation, it's not especially well-regulated, neither is that Sort of so sort of a lot of murky. You know, and and and we, we, we always talk and you come to the awards tomorrow you'll hear me talk more about it. We always talk about worrying about the race to the top, accepting there's always going to be a race to the bottom. That's the battle we've got to win.

David: 1:05:47

It's not really about my business being more successful than someone else's, it's. Do we want to do RegFit this way Properly well, you know, long-term thinking, long-term investment or do we want to do it this way Measures-based, based silos, people not understanding what they're doing, um, people not working well together. No coordinator signing off, rush. We've got to make a choice. I'll leave you with that thought because time for tea. You've got to make a choice, and now you've got to make it now. Do you want to go that way, would you want?

Simon: 1:06:23

to get that? Yeah, and there's always those forks in the road in business and it's what gets you up on a Monday morning is that ability to you know stand over what you do? So this week we're recording this during Future Build, which you've been involved in for many years now, curating the retrofit area. I think the conference, yeah, it came yeah, yeah, how long have you been doing that now?

David: 1:06:50

um, we started it in 2019, I think, and it was a. It was a seminar. Barely caught a theater again about 20 seats, you know or so, and a rubber uh oh, you know what I remember yeah I was in a hotel room the other side of the excel.

Simon: 1:07:07

There, and it was. I took a beautiful picture of the sun going down at the end of 2019 over the excel and a week later it became the national hospital. For the covid thing.

David: 1:07:19

You're a year later was that a year later we started in 2019. 2020 was covid and the covid. It was the first. You know. It was the last show that ran before. Later we started in 2019. 2020 was covid and the covid. It was the first, you know. It was the last show that ran before. That's right a lot down in it yeah, so you did the.

Simon: 1:07:30

It was the year before that you did the first one first did it.

David: 1:07:32

Okay, it's sort of um scale, scale. A couple of years ago we decided it wasn't a zone of a show anymore, it was a show in its own right. So, yeah, call it a national regimenig Conference. And last year most of the 200C conference area was packed throughout, and I think this week will probably be much the same.

David: 1:07:50

So, yeah, it keeps growing and you know we're very. It's the only conference really where we keep the focus on quality and scale. Yeah, there's no point doing one without the other, no point doing amazing retrofit to too few houses and then we've got to have both.

Simon: 1:08:09

so that's what this is all about and just to round this off, talking to another sector that's perhaps facing a similar journey to the one retrofit has had to gone on um, on developing skills, understanding the framework, building the let's go generating true value. If you were rewriting your journey or advising somebody on a journey from back, then what advice would you give? Where? Where'd you put the effort in when it comes to, to training the skills and developing?

David: 1:08:44

so that's a really good question, so let me try and answer it diplomatically, but honestly. Right, we've trained 8 000 people. Okay, there are things I wish could have done differently. There's always things you know you want to change about that. But we trained 8 000 people because we've taken the risk, we've taken the initiative, we've disrupted right. It has got next to nothing to do with organizations and bodies that you may, in the general public, may think are there to do that, are there to make that kind of thing happen. I get criticized a lot. Actually, there are people in our industry who, frankly, go around slagging me off because I think they think I shouldn't have done this or we shouldn't have done this. We'd have been much better off if we were still sat around in workshops talking about doing this in the future, and there's a whole load of those people, yeah, generating a whole load of hot air and very little about it yeah, um.

Simon: 1:09:49

So the world is full of, uh, talking shops, that's for sure far too many of those.

David: 1:09:53

Yeah, and, and we've been, uh, down to now. There are times where we can be, you know, maybe we can be a bit of a bull in the china shop, all right, but you know, we're restless, we're disruptive, we're agitators, we want to get stuff done and we have got stuff done. So I make no apology to all those people who now get them. They're not interested in retrofit until the money's floating around, all the funding's floating around. All of a sudden, they're experts in retrofit.

David: 1:10:20

So my advice to the ventilation sector would be find a group of people and it tends to be people, not organizations who are as passionate about it as you are. And I've got the right ethos and the right sort of yeah, let's make a difference type attitude. Bring those people together, get working collaboratively Not in competition genuinely collaborating. Find the leader. Might be you, be, you son could be someone else. Find a leader who's going to sit at the heart and take responsibility for making that work. Um, and get on with it, and you know what? The government and investors and everyone else will thank you for it because, um, the last thing you know government um, we really enjoy working with the officials that we work with. They're great, but they're the first to admit that they're not necessarily the people to provide leadership around the things that we're doing. They're there to administrate and run a government. They're not there to solve the retrofit skills crisis.

Simon: 1:11:24

Yeah, and I don't know something like retrofit. Maybe you could argue with ventilation because it it could become a trade and you could learn it through college, like you would as an electrician or a plumber, notwithstanding all the challenges those sectors have as well, but perhaps a slightly different beast in some way, but definitely with retrofit. You can see it, retrofit training was never going to happen out of academia like it. Just who's going to, who's going to take it on?

David: 1:11:58

they tried. Some people have tried, have they yeah?

Simon: 1:12:01

yeah, yeah was there college courses. You could go on at some point. Yeah, there still are?

David: 1:12:07

um, we've we partnered with about a dozen colleges around the country who want to do what we do and we've helped them to do it. But they've had very little success accessing a market and serving a market. So now we can give them the best courses. What have you?

Simon: 1:12:23

but culturally that that's a very difficult set yeah, and I'm involved in a few high diplomas in ireland on retrofit for energy and things like that, and there's a lot of perhaps I don't know how to put it politely um, lots of administration in education that slows it down. Perhaps it's very slow, you know, whereas you've got, you can be nimble and out the gates and innovate and so on. Do you think, how do you think, training might change over the next few years? Do you see more video content, more shorter form stuff, different type of ai starting to play a part in accessing knowledge and information? I mean, it's all moving really quickly isn't?

David: 1:13:13

it. Well, technology is, yes, sector isn't. Uh, I mean again, that's, that's our without giving our business track your way in too much detail to how many capacitors there are. You know that's exactly what we're looking to do. You know, when COVID happened, everything had to go online.

David: 1:13:32

We saw that as a scary place at the time, but we saw it as an opportunity and we figured out quickly how to get good at e-learning. And then we worked out that e-learning just leaving people to it isn't effective enough. So we developed a new approach, which we call sported online learning, which is where they're doing a lot of learning online but they're spending a lot of time in video classrooms and they're spending a lot of time engaging with people on social platforms and community platforms, which is great. Um, what we're now doing is take energy assessment. You know, carrying a red fit assessment spayer type thing. You know it is clearly necessary to get those people into properties carrying out surveys under supervision. It's actually a really hard thing to do and a very expensive thing to do. Um, we're figuring, we're working on how you can do that using virtual environments interesting?

Simon: 1:14:29

yeah, because I was going to ask you about that supervision stroke mentoring element that's so important in learning. Um, that's a hard one to to cover online, or has been traditionally anyway no, I think it lends itself.

David: 1:14:41

Yeah, I think it completely lends itself to it. So, really, I can connect any retributor in the country with one of five subject matter experts within 24 hours. Yeah, how could I do that if everything was in a classroom? Yeah, how can I? I can answer one of us. How can I guarantee whatever your question is within two days, you will get an answer to it, if you don't use technology to enable them?

Simon: 1:15:07

and that's part of the environment that you've created within the retrofits academy, that you've got that group of people.

David: 1:15:11

Yeah, oh, we sort of you, can, you people, can you know I, I we get attacked again as e-learning providers as if it's a negative thing. It's the only possible way of doing what we're doing. Ask how it needs to happen. You just need to do it well and you know. And you know we're a CRC. Our focus isn't making huge offers. Our focus is the mission, which is training 50,000 competent retrofitters by 2030. That's what it's all about. No point retrofitters by 25th, 30. That that's what it's all about. Nobody getting to the volume unless they know what they're doing. And they won't know what they're doing unless you provide them with that lifelong support and do you, do you think an association is a fundamental part of that structure?

David: 1:15:59

yeah, that's where the good practice comes together. So yeah the firms that are out there figuring out, you know, using software or you know different, are all on different platforms. We're doing things in a slightly different way, or it's design or coordination or assessment, um, coming together, they're all facing common challenges. Uh, they're all trying things out and um, you said that's what the association could form for it's not lobbying particularly, it's it's practice yeah, it's not a representative association in the sense it's just there to lobby and respond to consult and consultations.

David: 1:16:35

It's a it will do that, of course not why it exists yeah it exists to forge good practice to share and, crucially, to make those services affordable the point we were talking about earlier Because there's no point in having good practice that no one can afford. So, yeah, Brilliant.

Simon: 1:16:54

Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favour? If you enjoyed the podcast and know someone else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. And do check out the youtube channel by the same name and subscribe if you can, as there will be additional content posted here quite regularly. This podcast was brought to you in partnership with echo, ultra protect, imbiot and erico all great companies who share the vision of this podcast. Your support of them helps their support of the show. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet. See you next week.