At the National Home Improvement Council’s 50th anniversary Parliamentary Reception last year, I introduced three words that I said would provide our roadmap towards 2030:
Reduce. Respect. Rebuild.
At this year’s Parliamentary Reception, held at the House of Lords, it felt important to ask a simple question: what have we actually done?
Because the 3Rs were never intended to be words on a slide. They are about how we turn the knowledge and experience of our members into practical action – reducing poor practice and risk, respecting the workforce, consumers and responsible businesses, and rebuilding trust and confidence in home improvement.
Over the past year, that has increasingly become the thread connecting NHIC’s work.
Reduce: making quality easier to achieve
Our Competence, Compliance and Quality Working Group, chaired by Jon Vanstone, is focused on reducing poor practice and risk and making quality easier to achieve.
Through our work on Condition 17, alongside competence and quality assurance, PAS 2035, insurance-backed guarantees and the changing regulatory environment, we have created a stronger route for domestic RMI into conversations with the Building Safety Regulator and Industry Competence Committee.
That matters because our sector is different. Much of domestic repair, maintenance and improvement is delivered by SMEs and sole traders, working in occupied homes across millions of individual jobs.
Ultimately, success isn’t another standard or report sitting on a website.
Success is somebody doing a better, safer job in somebody’s home because of it.
We have also seen the value of bringing different parts of our work together. When concerns emerged around ECO, NHIC convened a discussion with Minister Martin McCluskey and the chairs of both our Competence, Compliance and Quality and Carbon and Energy Efficiency working groups.
It demonstrated an important part of NHIC’s role. Sometimes we need to provide evidence, sometimes we need to challenge, and sometimes the most useful thing we can do is get the right people around the table.
Our Carbon and Energy Efficiency Working Group, co-chaired by Chris Beedel and Sandy MacGregor, looks at the wider delivery challenge – bringing together expertise across retrofit, energy efficiency, products and installation to test national ambition against the reality of delivery.
Having the right policy objective does not automatically guarantee the right outcome.
Programmes need to work for the businesses expected to deliver them, particularly SMEs and microbusinesses, and ultimately for the person whose home we are improving.
Rebuild: confidence on both sides of the doorstep
Our Consumer Voice and Installer Advocacy Working Group, chaired by Anna Thompson, looks at the home-improvement experience from both sides of the front door.
How does a homeowner navigate what can be a complicated market? How do they know who to trust? What happens when something goes wrong?
But equally, are we listening properly to installers?
Rebuilding consumer trust cannot mean treating every installer as the problem.
The overwhelming majority of people working in our sector want to do good work, build good businesses and leave their customers happy. Our systems should help responsible businesses to achieve that, not make it unnecessarily difficult.
That is why we deliberately bring consumer and installer perspectives together, looking at the customer journey and access to clear information and support, while ensuring the experience of those actually delivering work in people’s homes is heard.
Practical initiatives such as our Doorstep Digests are part of that approach, making complicated information more accessible to homeowners, residents and tradespeople.
Because consumer protection should not start when something goes wrong.
Effective redress is essential, but genuine consumer protection begins much earlier: with competent people, clear information, appropriate assurance, good communication and systems that support responsible businesses to do good work.
That is how we rebuild confidence on both sides of the doorstep.
Respect: start with the workforce we already have
Our skills work has reinforced another message that I believe needs to be heard much more clearly.
We need to start with the workforce we already have.
There is enormous competence and experience across domestic RMI. People who have spent twenty or thirty years working in homes do not suddenly become irrelevant because the technology changes.
Our challenge is to recognise that competence, build on it and create realistic pathways that enable people to develop the skills needed for the future.
Through our leadership of the Construction Skills Mission Board RMI Skills Working Group, we are helping to build a stronger national evidence base around the RMI workforce and the barriers to developing it.
That thinking has also fed directly into NHIC’s work alongside Energy UK, co-sponsoring Workforce Resilience within the DESNZ Warm Homes Plan Workforce Taskforce.
Rather than beginning simply by asking how many new people need to be trained, we asked a broader question:
What will enable the workforce we need to enter, participate in – and remain in – this market?
We tested that widely, reaching more than 50 organisations and over 150 experts.
The message was remarkably consistent: recognise and build on existing competence; make programmes accessible to SMEs and microbusinesses; and provide sufficient market confidence for businesses to invest in people and skills.
Skills investment follows market confidence.
For me, that is what Respect looks like in practice – recognising the people and businesses already delivering in our homes and designing the transition with them, rather than around them.
Respect must also go beyond skills and competence. Through our wider work with the Construction Leadership Council, NHIC is supporting the Joint Code of Practice for Mental Health and Wellbeing and its focus on prevention.
Because respecting our workforce also means respecting the person behind the qualification.
Your evidence travels
There is a common thread running through all of this.
Our members and stakeholders bring their knowledge, experience and evidence. NHIC creates the space to bring that together, test it and make sure it reaches the places where it can make a difference.
That might mean the Construction Leadership Council or Construction Skills Mission Board, conversations with government and the Building Safety Regulator, or national programmes such as the Warm Homes Plan.
That is where NHIC adds real value.
But NHIC hasn’t done this alone. Our members have shared evidence, responded to consultations, challenged proposals, joined working groups and given their expertise freely.
And that contribution matters.
Something raised by a member in an NHIC working group can become part of a wider evidence base, inform a national industry discussion and ultimately reach policymakers.
Your evidence travels.
That is what a membership organisation should do.
From ambition to delivery
One year on, Reduce, Respect and Rebuild are no longer simply three ambitions.
They provide a clear direction for our work: reducing poor practice and risk; respecting our workforce, consumers and responsible businesses; and rebuilding trust and confidence in home improvement.
That is at the heart of Impact 2030.
Ultimately, we need a workforce able and willing to deliver the improvements our homes need, and homeowners who trust the people walking through their front door.
Government can set policy. Standards can set expectations. Industry can develop solutions. Organisations such as NHIC can convene, challenge and build the evidence.
But somebody still has to knock on a front door and do the work.
It is our workforce that turns ambition into action – one home at a time.
Our panel discussion at this year’s Parliamentary Reception asked: Rules, Culture or Confidence: What Really Drives Quality in Home Improvement?
The discussion brought out five themes: culture, rules, confidence, stability and community.
Perhaps that is the answer. We need the right rules and standards, but we also need the culture, confidence and stability that enable good businesses and good people to deliver – and a strong industry community willing to work together.
Compliance should be the baseline, not the finish line.
As we move into the next year of Impact 2030, our focus is now firmly on delivery: taking the evidence, experience and expertise of our members and turning it into practical change.
One installer, one doorstep and one home at a time.
Anna Scothern
Chief Executive
National Home Improvement Council