Bristol £25m housing retrofit: fabric and M&E upgrade lens for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Bristol City Leap, a joint venture between Bristol City Council and Ameresco, has launched a £25m retrofit programme to bring social housing in Henbury, Brentry, Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston up to at least EPC band C by March 2028. Works include external and cavity wall insulation, loft, roof and floor insulation, upgraded glazing and external doors, solar PV, energy‑efficient heat pumps, enhanced ventilation and low‑energy lighting. Funded through the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund and managed by the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority, the scheme will test an area‑based delivery model at city scale.
Technical Brief
- £25m programme approved specifically for north Bristol social housing stock, not private dwellings.
- Delivery concentrates on Henbury, Brentry, Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston estates as defined target zones.
- Works are structured as Bristol’s first large-scale, area-based retrofit deployment rather than individual-property upgrades.
- Completion is programmed by March 2028, implying a multi‑year rolling construction and access schedule.
- Bristol City Leap operates as a formal joint venture between Bristol City Council and Ameresco for delivery.
- Capital comes from the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero’s Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund allocation.
- Funding administration is via the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority, with South West Net Zero Hub as delivery manager.
Our Take
Bristol City Leap is one of the few city-scale decarbonisation vehicles in our Infrastructure database, signalling that Bristol City Council is using programme-style delivery rather than one-off retrofits to meet housing and net-zero targets.
The involvement of the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero and the South West Net Zero Hub suggests this north Bristol housing work could become a reference model for other West of England authorities seeking to aggregate domestic energy-efficiency upgrades into bankable pipelines.
A roll-out running to March 2028 aligns with other long-horizon Sustainability-tagged infrastructure pieces, indicating contractors in the South West may be able to plan multi-year workloads around housing retrofit and low-carbon heat rather than relying solely on new-build schemes.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
