About YOU! Homeowners Questionnaire Results (2023)

Edinburgh Residents’ thoughts on Building Retrofit and Improvement

We have limited resources, know that there’s a huge amount to do and yet can’t do ‘everything, everywhere, all at once’, so, to introduce our ideas as widely as possible and test our belief that there is interest in collaborative community-led building retrofit and improvement among the homeowners of the city, we created a homeowners questionnaire* which we circulated as widely as possible.

In the context of building retrofit and improvement, the questionnaire explores the perception of obstacles (and their relative importance), as well as the things that might help to overcome them. It covers individual work and then introduces the potential of collaborative community-led work, before exploring respondents’ perceptions of its benefits and challenges.

The responses received over a period of six weeks from being launched in summer 2023 were analysed in some detail and are reported in this document.

We use the results (headline summary below) to help us plan what to do, where and when.

NB: The questionnaire remains open – we’re keen to continue to get your views and rankings on obstacles (and possible means of overcoming them) to both building retrofit and improvement in general as well as the advantages and challenges of working collaboratively in a community-led way.

A summary of key results:

143 responses from 54 city neighbourhoods!
75% from shared ownership buildings.

Major concerns (about both individual and collaborative retrofit) were:
– Costs;
– The challenges working with others;
– Trustworthiness of many aspects of the process;
– Legal changes needed.

Specific concerns for collaborative retrofit were:
– Management and leadership of joint projects;
– Knowing what to do at building level;
– Additional legal aspects for joint projects;
– Wanting to see prior examples of successful collaborative retrofit.

Preferences to help overcome the concerns about collaborative work were:
– External independent assistance.

* The issues facing tenants in the private rental sector are more complex again than those for homeowners. For practical reasons we chose to limit our research and focus initially to the homeowner community.

Many people would like an independent trusted support organisation and for a third party to facilitate group work.

Respondents came from many parts of the city:

Respondents by neighbourhood - the darker the pin, the more in that area.

Our thanks are due to the volunteers of ‘Data 4 Climate Action Edinburgh‘ for the generous donation of their time and expertise in carrying out some of the analysis and preparation of graphics used in the report.