November 2012: Amongst the various proposals set out in the Government recently published energy efficiency strategy is one relating to the Mayor’s energy efficiency retrofit programme targeted at public sector buildings, RE:FIT, with DECC announcing that the Department will be:
34. …funding the initial rollout of the RE:FIT programme nation-wide to public sector organisations and will work with Local Partnerships and the Government Procurement Service to establish this support. The Greater London Authority has pioneered the Mayor of London’s award winning programme to deliver the energy efficiency improvement of the public sector estate. This is achieved through a simplified ESCO procurement framework and the provision of a RE:FIT Programme Delivery Unit team to provide technical support to projects.
35. The RE:FIT concept was initially piloted in 42 public sector buildings across London.These projects retrofitted energy savings measures to approximately 146,000m2 of building space, delivering over 7,000 tonnes reduction in carbon emissions and an average 28% reduction in energy consumption identified.The total spend was £7 million with a simple payback period of 7 years. Since the success of this pilot over 100 buildings have now successfully undergone retrofits and over 50 organisations, including Local Authorities, NHS Trusts, and Universities, have committed to using RE:FIT and the project pipeline contains in excess of 300 further properties. A new RE:FIT Framework has recently been tendered which further develops the approach and enables a wide range of financing options to be used.
Further information on the Mayor’s RE:FIT programme can be found here. No further information on the national rollout of RE:FIT appears to be available as yet.