Delivering Compliant Retrofit at Scale for Housing Associations, Local Authorities & Tier 1 Contractors

A PAS 2035 retrofit assessment is a whole-dwelling survey covering condition, energy performance, occupancy, ventilation and moisture. It is the required starting point before any retrofit measures are designed, and it feeds the property's Medium-Term Improvement Plan.

The assessment combines an RdSAP energy survey with a building pathology and moisture risk review, so that measures are never designed or funded in isolation. This whole-house approach is what PAS 2035:2023 mandates, and it's a condition of funding under schemes like ECO4, GBIS and the Warm Homes Local Grant — installing insulation without first assessing ventilation and moisture risk is exactly what causes damp and mould problems after the event.

A PAS 2035 Retrofit Coordinator is the named professional responsible for planning, overseeing and quality-assuring a retrofit project from initial assessment through design, installation and evaluation. They make sure the measures installed match what was designed, that every trade involved is properly qualified, and that the finished work is correctly lodged with TrustMark.

The coordinator is distinct from the assessor, designer and installer under PAS 2035 — they sit above all three, managing risk, sequencing and evidence across the whole project. Without a coordinator in place, there's no single point of accountability for making sure the retrofit was actually delivered the way it was designed, which is exactly the gap PAS 2035 was introduced to close.

PAS 2030 sets the installation standard that installers must follow when fitting energy efficiency measures. PAS 2035 is the overarching framework governing how a whole retrofit project is planned, assessed, designed, coordinated and evaluated. In short, PAS 2035 covers the "what and why," while PAS 2030 covers the "how" of installing each individual measure.

PAS 2035:2023 was introduced to require a whole-building, risk-based approach to retrofit — assessment, design, monitoring and evaluation — rather than treating each measure as a standalone job. PAS 2030:2019+A1 sits underneath it as the installation specification. Both are required for any measure delivered under government-funded retrofit schemes; you can't have compliant PAS 2030 installation without a PAS 2035 process wrapped around it.

Awaab's Law is a legal requirement on social landlords in England to investigate and fix damp, mould and other hazards within strict, fixed timescales. It is named after Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old who died from prolonged exposure to mould in his home, and Phase 1 has been in force since 27 October 2025.

Under Phase 1, landlords must make emergency hazards safe within 24 hours, investigate significant damp and mould hazards within 10 working days, and give residents a written summary of findings within 3 working days of that investigation concluding. It applies to registered providers of social housing — local authorities and housing associations. Phase 2, due October 2026, extends the same duties to excess cold and heat, falls, structural hazards, fire and electrical safety, and hygiene.

An independent damp and mould investigation is a technical diagnosis of the actual cause of the problem — moisture ingress, condensation, thermal bridging or ventilation failure — carried out by a specialist with no financial stake in the remediation work that follows. It results in a written, timestamped report identifying the root cause and a clear remediation specification, rather than a generic recommendation to "treat the symptoms."

DEE Healthy Homes is built around this independence: our investigators are ventilation design specialists and building performance experts, not remediation contractors, so there's no incentive to recommend more work than a property actually needs. The landlord retains full control of which installer carries out the remediation, and the investigation report itself becomes the evidence trail needed to demonstrate compliance under Awaab's Law.

A Medium-Term Improvement Plan is a property-specific roadmap, produced as part of a PAS 2035 assessment, that sequences the energy efficiency and fabric improvement measures a home needs over several years rather than as one single intervention. It ensures each measure is installed in the right order and in a way that's compatible with what comes next.

This sequencing matters because retrofit measures interact with each other — insulating a wall changes how a building manages moisture and ventilation, for example, which affects what can safely be installed afterwards. The MTIP is what lets a landlord plan phased investment across multiple funding rounds without accidentally undermining an earlier improvement or creating a new damp risk.

Retrofit designs must be signed off by a PAS 2035 Registered Retrofit Designer, a role that requires specific recognised qualifications. At DEE this is held by John Bradbury MCIOB, one of the UK's few MCIOB-qualified PAS 2035 Registered Retrofit Coordinators and Designers.

Sign-off confirms the proposed measures are technically sound, compatible with the existing building fabric, and compliant with PAS 2035 before installation can proceed — it's a distinct, accountable role from the assessor who surveys the property or the coordinator who oversees delivery. Designer qualifications typically combine a recognised retrofit design qualification with registration on the TrustMark-recognised competent person scheme.

Yes — DEE carries out programme-level assessment and coordination across housing portfolios of any size, from Warm Homes Local Grant contracts covering an entire local authority area to routine batches for housing associations, not just one-off single-property surveys.

DEE currently delivers the Warm Homes Local Grant programme for Cheshire East Council, having ranked 1st of 29 bidders, alongside 6,000+ retrofit projects delivered nationally with a sub-2% TrustMark failure rate. Portfolio work includes standardised reporting, qualification tracking and TrustMark lodgement management across the whole stock, with the same 48-hour design turnaround applied consistently at scale.