Advances in digital technology have inaugurated a ‘fourth industrial revolution’, enabling, inter alia, the growth of ‘offsite’ housing construction in advanced economies. This productive transformation seems to be opening up new opportunities for styles of living, ownership, place-making and manufacturing that are more sustainable, democratic and bespoke. However, the full potential of this transformation is not yet clear nor how it will interact with—in the UK context—ongoing crises in housing provision rooted in an increasingly financialised and critically unbalanced national economy, timid state housing policies and a longstanding cultural preoccupation with mortgaged ‘bricks and mortar’ housing. In this paper, we report on an ongoing mixed method project interrogating the technological, environmental and social implications of the emergence of offsite housing construction in the UK. To a degree, we situate this interrogation in the Northern English region of Yorkshire, an emerging focal point of the growing offsite construction industry in the UK but an area afflicted by entrenched, post-industrial economic imbalances. The results show that offsite house engineers, designers and builders are innovatively embracing digital methods, a low carbon agenda and new approaches to place-making but that they have had little role, so far, in resolving the deeper structural problems affecting housing production in the UK, bringing the sustainability of their innovation into question.

Policy Highlights: To achieve the recommendation stated in the chapter title, we propose the following: Member States should empower municipalities with resources and training to develop Building Renovation Plans supported by One-Stop Shops focused on inclusive local supply chain development, employment and skills priorities, as well as serving housing retrofit consumers. Municipalities should use procurement frameworks and Direct Labour Organisations to ensure a pipeline of retrofit work and support training for good quality employment. Member States should implement licensing or minimum competency standards for housing retrofit professionals, ensuring certification schemes encompass a wider range of skills. Retrofit is an opportunity to enable new groups to enter the construction sector. Municipalities should co-create partnerships alongside employees, and support unionisation, to promote training and work opportunities for women and minorities. Developing inclusive pathways to a skilled housing-energy retrofit workforce is a socio-technical problem, requiring insights from social, policy, building and engineering disciplines, because retrofit interweaves human and technical practices and processes.

This chapter explores how behaviours in the context of an individual's job and work can have positive environmental outcomes, even if those behaviours are not explicitly driven by environmental concern. We focus on one area where work behaviours directly influence environmental outcomes: construction activity to reduce energy demand in existing housing ('retrofit'); and on one group of people: the tradespeople operating in small building firms responsible for repair, maintenance and improvement (RMI) of existing homes. We use a model of behaviour change - COM-B - to explore the Capabilities, Opportunities and Motivations that shape Behaviour. We analysed qualitative datasets exploring the choices made at work by individuals in small building firms. We offer two suggestions for enabling individuals involved in construction to play a role in the radical transformation of buildings. First, policy, finance and action must start with where people are; second, do not tackle an aspect of a system in isolation.