Shared Footprints: How landlords and tenants can team up to cut carbon?

• Decarbonisation is now a core business continuity and risk issue (energy price volatility, energy security/resilience, reputational risk), not a “nice-to-have”.
• Heritage buildings need nuanced, “sympathetic” retrofits because standard EPC methods can be a poor fit.
• Landlord–tenant collaboration works best when it is structured: shared data such as sub-metering and joint audits, cost-sharing mechanisms, and green leases to formalise commitments.
• Human behaviour and building operation can make or break benefits; tenant engagement, space planning, and passive measures (ventilation, light zoning, thermal comfort) are critical alongside any physical upgrades.

Q: As a tenant, how do you approach your landlord to be more carbon conscious - how do you start the conversation?

A: Lead with the landlord’s language: investment risk, “flight to quality”, and avoiding stranded assets. Position decarbonisation as continuity/resilience and cost control (not only “save the planet”). Assume knowledge gaps: regulation/EPC changes are confusing; collaboration beats “tenant vs landlord” framing.

Q: As a tenant, how do you keep up with EPC changes/updates - and what happens if ratings change during your tenancy?

A: Track government updates plus industry commentary (recognising the current uncertainty/flux). Don’t “wait for certainty”: delay increases costs and squeezes delivery, especially with heritage skills shortages. EPC obligations are triggered when the certificate expires (typically 10 years), rather than changing mid-tenancy. Practical suggestion: renew/redo EPC earlier to “lock in” a rating for the full validity period; lease renewals may not require a new EPC (new leases do).

Q: What are your experiences of green leases and structured clauses?

A: Strongly supportive - clarity and process help both parties know where they stand. This encourages tenants to start with light–medium green clauses to build collaboration early (before mandated “dark green” compliance later). Still emerging, but solicitors/surveyors are increasingly discussing it. Structured clauses help evidence commitment (useful for investors, tenders, funding) and reduce greenwashing risk.

Q: Where can we find out more about offering carbon literacy to tenants?

A: Historic England offers Carbon Literacy training sessions. The Carbon Literacy Project also provides training options (particularly beyond heritage-specific audiences)

Q: You mentioned cooling uses 4x more energy than heating - any practical reflections on what people can do?

A: Prioritise passive, non-mechanical cooling and “dress for the weather” as part of behaviour change. Avoid assuming renewables make energy “free” - Jevons Paradox still applies; reducing demand is the goal. Overheating is a growing risk; heritage constraints make passive measures and personalised approaches especially important.

Speakers: Becky Valentine – Spenbeck Consulting. Sarah Rousseau – Historic England.

Sarah: I'm really pleased to be welcoming you today!

This is the second webinar in our series all about the challenges of working with tenants and/or landlords, and it's something that's come up quite a lot in our training.

So I'm really pleased that Becky Valentine has agreed to come and speak on this today. Not only is Becky, one of our wonderful carbon reduction trainers, she's also a sustainability and building health consultant with a wealth of experience and knowledge in collaborating with tenants and landlords to cut carbon.

So I'm going to hand over to Becky for what I know will be a really interesting and informative session. Please pop your questions for Becky in the chat, and we'll have some time at the end to go through those.

So I'll hand over to Becky.

Thank you!

Becky: Thanks, Sarah!

Hi, everyone!

Just— Becky is also struggling with her voice, so apologies if I have to just cough my way through this a little bit. Thanks so much for your time this morning!

Becky: Just a little bit of background as to why I'm here before we start. So Sarah's kind introduction is about me, but about Spenbeck as a whole, we are 45 years young this year, and we've had those 45 years of being eco-heritage landlords and being able to demonstrate throughout that, that landlords and tenants can successfully work together to reduce energy usage. Rooted in our heritage expertise, but also working across buildings of all ages, we support owners, occupiers, and investors to drive performance and profit through energy efficiency, health, and responsive design.

And my work focuses on improving energy efficiency, building climate resilience, meeting these regulations, delivering behaviour change, and optimising indoor environment to support mental health, performance, and profit. As well as being a heritage sector carbon literacy trainer and bespoke course writer, I'm also the co-vice chair of the fees, and the real estate lead at Grade II listed Nottingham Town Hall, and recently have joined the East Midlands Combined Authority steering group for its retrofit strategy as the heritage sector representative.

I'm a regular conference keynote speaker on the vital role that heritage sector plays in achieving net zero and the need for it all to be brought into mainstream policy discussion very briefly.

Becky: Some of the clients we work with range from household national names such as Historic England and National Trust, right down to very small heritage organisations, volunteer-led charities, and also conservation architects.

Becky: So before I start, I want to explore with you how we can work together to cut carbon, but we have to horizon scan that, and we need to understand the changes we can expect in our external environment that can influence how we can best work together.

Becky: And so what does the future look like? Well, what we've noticed in the current climate is that the only certainty we can take is that we have to run our decision-making through what we call a VUCA lens, that the world we inhabit is only going to ever get more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

So when we're thinking about trying to cut carbon, whether we're a tenant or a landlord trying to work together, we can't be focusing on what the environment is now. We need to absolutely be planning for what it looks like.

So let's have a look at some of those in a bit more detail. The energy costs— I first drafted this slide a month ago. A lot can change in a month, but what we're seeing is even more so energy costs are incredibly volatile. The war is currently creating oil and gas spikes in pricing. That uncertainty, regardless of when the war ends, will feed through for many years to come now. So whether we thought we had high energy costs already, they're going to get even higher.

We also have renewable infrastructure cost upgrades that we're now locked into for 20 years. So while we have the certainty of the price fix, and there is some— about it being quite high, and therefore those upgrade costs are going to be feeding through into our day-to-day costs as well.

We also have this link to inflation, which will increase sharply in the short term due to the situation in the Gulf. When we think about energy efficiency, one thing that tends to drop out of the conversation that we always make sure we work with, with clients is that of energy security. They kind of run hand in hand.

So when we're planning to cut our carbon footprint, we also need to be aware of our energy resilience. We are seeing increasing sabotage from foreign interference and we're vulnerable to these world shocks given our position as a net importer of energy currently. and therefore thinking about how we can ensure as we try and cut our footprint that we're not reducing our energy security is absolutely key.

There's then an increasing issue with data sources, sorry, data center and capacity shortages. So there has been widespread acknowledgement by the UK government that actually between 2030 and 2035, we may well see rolling blackouts because the exponential rise of data centre energy requirements can't be met by the grid until about 2035. So that ties into the energy security and understanding that landscape of how we need to consider our footprint in line with that vulnerability.

And then we need to think about our reputation, not just in that carbon footprint cutting world that we all want to inhabit, but as heritage sector organisations and the need to fight off that narrative that decarbonising heritage buildings are challenging, problematic, too expensive.

And then finally, this is issue of regulatory compliance. I'm just going to touch on a little bit because it does tend to drive the conversation between landlord and tenant.

Becky: So MEES regulations, Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards, they're a thing if you're a landlord or a tenant, and they can't be ignored. Currently, you need an EPC if you're letting a property or you're choosing to sell, and the minimum requirement for non-domestic is E rating at the moment. Now there's been a lot of consultation, a lot of decision-making. The domestic MEES regulation changes have been finalised, but they've also recently— I think it was last week— they've been delayed.

We're not— we don't have quite so much certainty in the non-domestic world currently, but the conversation has been around that we will need to be EPCB by 2030 or possibly 2031. Now it did originally have a sort of interim level of needing to be EPCC by 2027, that's gone.

Now, we'll talk a little bit as we go on about whether that would have been more useful to have that as a bit of a carrot for people. There is a suggestion that certification may be reduced from 5— from 10 years to 5 years, so we need to think about how that's going to impact costs and investments.

Becky: And then what we have is this concern around the reliability of EPCs to traditionally constructed buildings. There has been a lot of conversation. The previous government acknowledged and was working towards changes to EPCs that take into account how heritage buildings perform in a way that current EPC methodology doesn't.

And it's really important to understand the appropriateness of methods being used, whether you use the SBEM method or the DSM method. I'm getting into a bit of technicality here, but it's so important when we're wanting landlords and tenants to work together to understand that neither side fully understands this. It's not our area of expertise unless we're energy assessors ourselves. Quite often in the heritage sector, people become accidental landlords. It might be an organisation is having to try and raise revenue as much as it can, so it finds a space, it's created a lease, so not necessarily understanding quite how this is being driven.

There are changes supposed to be coming through that do, as I say, take on board the nuances and context of traditional buildings, but we wait to see what that looks like.

There's also the updating of carbon factors. Now, it's acknowledged that these upgrades will impact ratings, and whilst it's hard to predict what those outcomes are going to be, either positive or negative, the general view from industry is that older and traditionally constructed buildings will see a more pronounced change in their rating, be that up or down.

A lot of the conversation is confusing for those of us in the heritage world because there's all this talk about exemptions, or you don't need an EPC, EPC, and the narrative is confusing. I've heard EP assessors, EPC assessors, talking about things incorrectly. You do need an EPC if you're leasing a property, but you can, in certain circumstances, need it to then go, oh, I don't, I don't need one, I don't need to do the work. But you have to go through the process of an EPC to say that, to demonstrate you're exempt.

And there are various ways that you can be exempt. I've just drawn on sort of the foremost relevant for the heritage sector. So it could be that you're not able to get listed building consent or planning permission for the works that are recommended that come with your EPC. It could be that you are listed or protected, and therefore the improvements would be unacceptable because they'll change the character of the building or the appearance of the building, and so you wouldn't be allowed to do the work. If the work devalues the property by 5% or more, then you can be exempt. And also, if all the improvements were to be made and it still doesn't reach the requirement then there is an exemption there.

So again, people are sort of holding on to wondering what the exemptions are going to look like, whether they're going to continue. And the running theme that I want to put through this is that please don't wait for that exemption, and I'll talk about why in a moment.

I also wanted to share this with you. It's not entirely relevant, but it kind of sets the scene of where we are with MEES regulations and the drivers of cutting carbon footprints. This is an assessor I spoke to who summed up EPCs as an estimate of an assumption, not grounded in reality, which isn't ideal with all of those sort of caveats. But it's the background in which we live as a tenant or as a landlord. But we just need to be aware of that, I think, as we have these conversations and we move forward about reducing carbon footprints.

Becky: Now, the consequence of trying to reduce our footprint is we come across this thing called the split incentive problem. Basically what happens here is capital expenditure for energy efficiency retrofits tends to fall in the lap of the landlord, pretty much all of it. But the financial benefits seen through reduced energy bills are generally perceived to be gained solely by the tenant. And the consequence of this incentive problem is that landlords are therefore reluctant to invest because they feel they can't easily recoup costs through higher rents. And tenants understandably may not wish to invest in a property that either they don't own or they don't have a long lease on.

Now, as a landlord of 45 years, with my landlord hat and as my consulting hat, I don't believe the split incentive problem exists in our current and our future climate, and I want to spend the rest of the session explaining to you how and why that's the case.

Becky: Given the uncertainty around these regulations and other compliance that's feeding through, quite understandably, landlords in particular feel they want to wait for a fixed date. However, if landlords do that, what you find is if we're waiting towards 2030, 2031, waiting for clarity from government, what happens is you'll have overcrowded contracted demand, there'll be less supply, which immediately increases prices. We're already seeing inflated retrofit costs now, and the costs are only going to increase year on year.

And then you find yourself with a compressed delivery program because it's tempting to wait for government confirmation, but what we're seeing is a reduction in the time between the confirmation of requirements and when you have to start the work by. We're seeing that shortened, so it's not as if maybe you might have had 2 years to be compliant. Now they're starting to bring it down to maybe only a year, so that puts huge financial and time pressures on landlords.

But from a tenant perspective as well, it might see that they might see some of their service charge increase quite high quite highly. Not all energy efficiency upgrades can be put through service charge, but some can. And in that instance, all of a sudden you'll see a huge rise that they might not be able to stand. Or at rent review dates, they may see a significant increase being asked for. They may have to vacate while works are being done, and again, I'll talk about that. Or they might have to vacate because the EPC rating doesn't meet their own particular needs.

And so we have a real concern about stranded assets, and we work a lot with landlords to try and make sure that we are reducing the chances of that happening.

Becky: So I just want to finish this section before we move on to looking at the challenges and how we can work together to really drill home this point. This is not a nice-to-have. This is all about continuity now, and it's a big risk. And energy efficiency, energy resilience should really be included in the risk register rather than, ugh, this is a cost. An environmental thing we have to do. So this is no longer about environmental extras.

Becky: So I want to go through some of the challenges and the collaborative responses to help you. Now, rather than overwhelm, I've chosen sort of our— in our experience, the 3 key areas that people can focus on to improve that landlord-tenant collaboration.

Becky: So the first one is data sharing. There's an increasing requirement for landlords of all sizes to report. There's also a requirement for more individual organisations to report as well. Some will have signed up to initiatives as tenants that insist that they report on their Scope 1 and 2, but increasingly funding requirements, sponsorship requirements are requiring this information to be shared.

There is sometimes a reluctance to do this. Might be transparency information, that the results might not be as good as people are hoping, so they don't want to share to damage their reputation. But quite often, and particularly for smaller landlords, smaller tenants, there's that insufficient resource and capabilities to do this, and that really needs to be acknowledged. They don't quite know how, and that's one of the fantastic training courses that Historic England are sharing in terms of how to measure your carbon footprint to then be able to share it and be transparent. So the links for that will be shared at the end of the session.

Becky: One of the ways to overcome this is to agree for submetering. This reduces that lack of resource and capability issue by sending information straight to the landlords. It's also really useful to help tenants understand where they are at their carbon reduction journey. It also reduces sometimes friction in terms of access. A lot of people working hybrid situations now, so trying to get the information shared, it just takes a lot of the friction out. It could be that joint-funded energy audits between the landlord and the tenant are agreed to. Again, extremely useful to help that starting point on the journey, and it also— those energy audits then allow the landlord to be able to see what their energy use looks like across the building if they have multiple tenants.

Becky: Then we move on to the issue of operational disruption. It can often be that if you're needing to or looking to do energy upgrades, it might be that you can't wait until the end of a tenancy. There's the urgency to do it sooner than that, and because of that, it might be that tenants have to pause their operations. It might be that they have to temporarily vacate because actually the works are going to take quite a few weeks, and so they either— if they can work from home, or they may have to find somewhere else. This is a cost to both. So from a landlord perspective, if there is certainly a required to vacate, there will be negotiated rent-free. And while landlords can get energy efficiency upgrade cover, that cover only ensures they're protected against damaging tenant property. There is no— currently no insurance cover for covering rent-free periods through energy efficiency upgrades.

From a tenant cost, you have possible reduced output by pausing your operations, or if you're having to move out, it might be difficult to be able to do that. Again, certain contexts mean that it's easier for people to move out than others. There may be less disruption, but that needs to really be considered, and it's normally quite a barrier for people being able to accept energy efficiency upgrades.

Becky: So how do we manage this? Well, there are various different levels of cooperation, and I'll take you through Green Leases in the next slide. It can be just as simple as a Memorandum of Understanding right through to legally binding requirements. The idea of this is that cost-sharing mechanism and looking at that split incentive problem and thinking, well, actually it benefits both of us. If we have reduced our carbon footprint, it's better for both parties for reasons we've touched on and we're going to continue to go through. So actually sharing the cost makes it more realistic than having to just give it to one side or the other.

There's also conversations going around, around EPC renewals. So it could be that if your EPC still has a few years left to run, it might actually be better to have it redone now before the carbon factors change, but also to allow you to have a longer time to spend on capital requirements, capital infrastructure upgrades, and also plan better between landlords and tenants how to minimise those disruptions. If they're planned for rather than having to sort of do them with a degree of immediacy, then that works better from a cost and a minimised disruption perspective as well.

Becky: So, looking at Green Leases, it may be that everyone on here has heard of them, but just in case you haven't, because they are just starting to come into common conversation, there's different colours, different shades, depending on the degree of flexibility. So, starting with the light green lease, this is about that voluntary approach between landlord and tenant.

There's a negotiation here. It's useful because there is no sort of legal requirement which might scare people off. The only concern with this is that because maybe you wait a bit too far and it's a bit too gentle and light touch, what happens is both landlords and tenants then have to move to sort of dark green clauses or the equivalent in terms of works to meet the regulations, and therefore the cost has increased.

Significantly for both, or certainly in terms of disruption cost to the tenant and therefore cost to the landlord. So we just have to be careful when we go light green that it's seen in that bigger picture of what we want the end result to look like.

Then we have medium green, that's a more collaborative approach where the obligations are a bit stronger and there's active partnership, active dialogue constantly between landlord and tenant to reach that common goal. And we're normally here looking for things that are reasonably practical practicable, but again, that's quite a subjective term.

And then finally, that dark green lease, that's those legally binding requirements mandated with specific targets. And so these are starting to be negotiated into leases. So if you're not aware of them already, please do be aware. And sometimes it's good for the tenants to offer because it just takes a bit of the sting out. Again, there's always this friction between, or perceived friction between landlords and tenants. So being proactive on this can really help take the sting out of that.

Becky: And then the final point that I want to spend a bit of time on is this issue of humans and the balance between physical retrofit and business culture. So the impact of occupant behaviour on landlord capital spend. EPCs demonstrate how the building will perform from an energy perspective. It doesn't— they don't demonstrate what we humans do to it once we get in there, and we can really scupper things.

We're experts in our own areas. What we tend to not be aware of, unless it's our specialism, is how buildings work. So the building physics. And quite often you can see occupant behaviour fighting against what the capital spend has tried to do. And there might be some wry smiles. I know when I chat to business owners, certainly they're pulling their hair out that whether they've invested in it or landlords invested in it, there's a huge amount of money goes into some energy efficiency upgrades and still the falling costs aren't happening as much as they were expecting because we pesky humans and our behaviour gets in the way.

Whether we like it or not, we tend to perceive energy at work as free. If we think about our energy-saving behaviours at home, which is becoming more and more important, we probably wouldn't leave the heating on as much, we wouldn't leave the lights on as long, maybe we'll put that jumper on instead of putting the boiler on. Maybe you've turned your heating off now, maybe a week or two before you normally would because of rising energy costs. We don't tend to translate that behaviour into the workplace, however well-intentioned we are, because in theory we're not paying for it. We don't recognize how we're paying for it in different ways. And so quite often there are energy-saving behaviours that we can absolutely create within the workplace.

Becky: And I want to introduce you, if you're not aware, to the work of the wonderful William Stanley Jevons, who came up in 1865 with basically nailing how human behavior works. And he talked about increased efficiency in using a resource, often leading to a higher total consumption of that resource rather than lower. And what he was basically saying was the more energy efficient something is, the more the human goes, "Oh no, it's fine. We can leave it. We can use more of it."

And unintentionally so, but the biggest example of this is with LEDs. You may well be aware in your own workspace, people tend to go, oh, it's LED, I can leave it on for longer. And what happens is, with the best intentions, we put in energy efficiency measures, but humans don't quite understand how that works, or their brain goes, it's energy efficiency, so it's fine. And we've seen it in the last 160 years, nothing really changes.

Becky: Ways around this are tenant engagement programmes. I'm going to share with you a case study of our own building in a moment, and so we know these work. The activities within an engagement programme range from the tenant paying for work for their own staff, or it could be that the landlord co-funds that, or even the landlord funds that. It could be subsidised carbon literacy training or wider training that can be incentivised behaviour change, or there can be what we experience is co-creation of actions and wider training needs. That shared dialogue again, that's going to be the running theme through this.

But also something was really important is responsive space planning, making sure that how the office is designed or the how we're using the building to make sure that we're trying to reduce energy through our behaviour as much as possible.

Becky: Now, space planning for carbon reduction focuses on building health, which is sort of the other hat that I wear, and it really underpins reduced carbon footprints in a natural, passive, non-mechanical way. And what it does is it brings in understanding how the human body works, understanding how we respond to our environment and its impact on our mental, physical health. And not only can it support improved health and wellbeing, does support health and wellbeing, but 3 particular foundations of building health also drive real improvements in energy efficiency and reduced carbon footprints.

And I just want to take you through those very briefly. So when we're thinking about these warmer, more intense summers that we're reaching, we're seeing a move toward mechanical cooling. And we're seeing the need to improve our ventilation. And quite often, particularly in heritage buildings, because they're seen as leaky, drafty, cold, we'll find the windows are painted shut. It may be that we have sash windows where the tops are all painted, but the bottom, you can open a handful of them.

And so what we need to do here is we need to understand how the building works, we need to understand how the windows work to try and create passive ventilation. And natural airflow, and that way we can bring in natural cooling in a way that we're not having to reach for the aircon, we're not having to pay for it to be installed.

Now, I fully appreciate as we move into those pockets of really hot summers, as we're starting to push 40 degrees, that we are possibly looking for aircon. But what we're talking about is actually for the majority of the year, you don't need that.

So how can we improve cross ventilation? How can we ensure it as much as possible by having windows that open on both sides? How can we get people to understand that actually what we need is we need a behaviour policy where we're purging? And so maybe the people just before they leave, they open the windows for a few moments, 4 or 5 minutes normally, just to get that stale air out. Or the people who come in first thing in the morning, encourage them to be opening windows, just get that air exchange, get the warmer, staler air out and bring cooler, fresher air in.

And we're thinking about lighting quite often. Again, that Jevons paradox about spending a lot more money even though we're on energy-efficient lighting. So taking a more localised approach, actually, as it gets different now, it's getting lovely and light, but as we get into sort of autumn and it starts to get darker, well, actually, do we need whole building lights on? You drive around, you see all these lights on all the time, and there's maybe a smattering of people in, starting to think about how we zone our lighting, how we create localised lighting through desk lamps. Not only are we using that to meet the sort of lighting needs of individual preferences, but actually that massively reduces a carbon footprint rather than doing this one-size-fits-all, whether or not they're LEDs.

And just to pick on that as well, we found very much we've tried to move away from PIR and sensor lights being the norm And please do speak again as a tenant, speak to your landlord or vice versa, because there's sometimes a lack of understanding of how this works. Quite often your PIRs have a minimum on time of 10 minutes, so you've tripped them, they turn on, but actually they don't switch off for another 10 minutes. And it might be that you just nipped into a room or something that maybe— quite often they're used in kitchen areas or washrooms and you don't need it for that length of time.

So sometimes when we place space-plan offices and buildings and schools, etc., what we're doing is we're zoning so that it makes more sense holistically in terms of where the energy use is required and for what length, so that we can minimise the total amount of time that those lights are switched on.

And then finally, thermal comfort, which certainly if you're in an office as a tenant, it's the biggest complaint across the UK is people are either too cold or too hot, and what we want to try and do is find their Goldilocks zone. And that Goldilocks zone is really great in helping reduce carbon footprints by becoming more energy efficient, because again, what we're looking at here with this approach is localising the thermal comfort, thinking about individual preferences, grouping people together.

For example, men and women have different needs, and I'll touch on that in the next slide. But thinking about how we can move away from that mass, I'm really cold, I want to put the heating on so the whole office is heated, or, you know, I'm really, really hot, can we— I'm just— I'm in charge of the aircon, I'm going to whack it up. Like, none of that really needs to happen. Again, we don't have that many extremes in temperature in the UK, so it's understanding how we can take that personalised, more localised approach.

Becky: And to support this, I love this graphic from Sketch Planations, and I appreciate it's a house, but, you know, it reflects every building that we have, particularly, you know, older buildings. What we're looking for here is radiant heat rather than conductive heat.

So how can you heat the person rather than heating the whole space or the whole building? Now, obviously, particularly important in heritage buildings is making sure we have that minimum temperature so we're not allowing moisture condensation to build up and damage the fabric of the building and create health problems for our occupants.

But how we design spaces, how we create the zoning so that the men— bless you— who wear shorts in winter when it's freezing, we can put you more near windows because actually you're more comfortable with that. As a general rule, women find that more uncomfortable. We need more heat.

So actually designing and working with the demographics of whoever's working in that space to go, okay, Where are your preferences? How can we work that? Then we're talking about, okay, we're reducing the need to whack up the heating, whack up the aircon, or people bringing in fans. And we know that sort of temporary heating or cooling measures are far more energy intensive. So what we're trying to do is move away from a reliance on electrical mechanical support and take a more passive, localised approach.

Becky: And then just to think about this, quite often people don't understand this, and that's fine, but cooling takes about 4 times more energy than heating. And as we're moving to those more intense, longer summers, we need to be thinking about how we can do that in a way that reflects the increase in energy pricing and that energy security. If we're relying on mechanical means to cool us and then we can't afford it or it's going to have a financial impact on other areas of the business because of limited resources. And then maybe we are having rolling blackouts. How do we manage that?

So it helps reduce the carbon footprint, but it also helps reduce risks to your business as well. And we also want to think about things like solar gain. There's a whole work we do with clients about how we can reduce the sun from hitting the windows in the first place and how we mitigate heat in a really passive way. So many different ways to explore this, and again, please don't think that if you're a tenant, your landlord is aware of this, and if you're a landlord, your tenant's going to be relying on you to do it. So it's really useful, a wealth of resources on the Historic England guidance pages around this, very inexpensive passive ways of reducing the carbon footprint while liaising both together on what's the best way to do it for individual tenants in their spaces.

Becky: So I just want to summarise here and really implore you to not fall for that standard landlord versus tenant trope. As far as I'm aware, the split incentive is dead. And these are the reasons why. Understanding that landlords and tenants, but mainly landlords, don't necessarily have a full grasp of the building, EPCs, the regulations around it, or what they need to do, particularly in heritage buildings. Where they're getting this message that it's going to be really expensive for them, really challenging and difficult. But that shared conversation around addressing costs and the energy waste that can be reduced together is going to be really beneficial to both sides. Both sides have a regulatory risk with the timeline coming, so it's essential for both to work together to try and mitigate that as much as possible.

Then there are ways of talking together and having that dialogue about how best to manage the incentive for both people to invest the money that's necessary. So are we going down a co-investment route? Is it beneficial to go, do you know what, I will stay longer, will increase the lease, either ask for that as a tenant or offer it as a landlord? And that way you can think about, okay, if we've got the longer lease security, the landlord is possibly more likely to invest because they've got a guaranteed rent coming. And also the tenant will think, well, okay, I know I'm guaranteed here for longer, it's worth me co-investing or investing some part.

Then it's that reputational risk. You can't afford really to be working in places or having buildings that are no longer seen to be energy efficient or moving towards energy efficiency. It's not a nice to have now as far as employees are concerned, future employees are concerned, investors, funders. I'm speaking at the British Council for Officers ESG Summit next week on this and the role that heritage buildings can play to really drive our net zero commitments.

So reputationally, it's absolutely a must-do rather than a nice-to-have now. And to support that, there are a lot of funding opportunities out there, and it can be quite confusing. So again, not relying on your landlord to know what's happening. If you as a tenant are aware, then please do share it with your landlord.

Sometimes we assume too much, the other side is in control of it, or the other side has awareness, and if we don't share that knowledge, we tend to think it's because they don't want to help. But please don't think that the other side, whether you're a landlord or a tenant, isn't interested. If you have information, particularly around funding and grant options, please do share that and use that to drive the conversation.

Becky: So what I'd like to do now is I'd just like to finish off with a little bit of an example of our Birkin Building case study. So, the Birkin Building in Nottingham is a 40,000 square foot of Grade II listed office space. It was originally home to international lace manufacturers Birkin and Co. If anyone here has heard of the Birkin bag, it was that family. It's the Jane Birkin family who had the building, who built the building and built a massively successful company from that. It's now highly sought-after. EcoHeritage Officers lauded and fed into the national conversation around the role that heritage can play in driving energy efficiency and that role of collaboration between tenants and landlords.

So what I want to do— you may want to turn your volume down just slightly because I think the volume on this is set a bit high, but I just want to share with you a bit of a video to show you around the building before I give you some examples of how we've worked together with our tenants to reduce our carbon footprint.

[Video]

Becky: Thank you very much. So just want to pick out some points that you saw— it's going crazy— hopefully saw on the video about how we work together. So in terms of— oh, Matt, is the slides jumping a little bit? Or is it just me?

Matt: They seem to be, don't they?

Becky: Let's get just to 26, I think, if possible. Just that one.

Matt: There you go.

Becky: Thank you! So, just summarizing through these different ways in which we work together, basically we have a very strong Spennbeck tenant community. And so the whole energy efficiency, energy efficiency program was based on tenant consultation and co-creation of what we all needed to make sure that we weren't doing it piecemeal. And because we had 13 tenants across the building, we needed to make sure that what we did worked for everybody. And for us, because they were offices, they, a lot of the driver was the ISO 14001 and the ECOR criteria as well from how they can improve energy efficiency and waste management, and obviously also the MEES regulations.

So just some whizzing through some of these from an energy efficiency perspective, it was only Scope 2 because we were only in electricity building, the Birkin building. So LED rollouts, app-controlled heating based on tenant consultation, that was, they preferred that responsiveness. To be able to, to better respond to the weather, but also the number of people who would be coming into the office, because this was all post-lockdown where we had a more hybrid experience across the building. We had secondary glazing installed. We actually negotiated with tenants to make sure that we minimized disruption. Nobody had to move out, but we did have some weekend work which we paid a premium for.

But again, as landlords, we recognized that was better and more cost-effective to pay that weekend premium than actually having to disrupt and move the tenants out for a little bit. So, we did that. We also had a feasibility study conducted to make sure that we can put solar PV and an air source heat pump in the building for the Phase 2 energy efficiency upgrades. We also spent quite a significant sum on improving the facade of the building, recognising that fabric-first approach, and we did that before we did any of the energy efficiency upgrades inside because obviously the building has to perform as she should to be able to support better carbon footprint reduction.

We also worked closely with our tenants on waste management, what was essential to them. One of the things that we didn't have originally that we then put in, particularly around food waste, we had a partnership with a local charity to be able to collect food waste, and they were able to use it for compost bins for their farm animals. We provided every tenant with a compost bin and sort of starter bin bags. That was something that they asked for. It was very conscious that their staff were calling for, but they didn't have the provision. That was up to us as landlords to be able to provide that, and we did that willingly.

From a sustainable travel perspective, so here, you know, all of these around thinking about our Scope 3 reductions, we made sure that we put in widespread infrastructure for cycling and other sustainable travel methods. So not only did we have the the secure bike racks, we had repair kits as well, and we had showers and lockers to make sure that actually it was authentic in the offer and that people weren't just being asked to cycle to work and then be hot and sweaty for the rest of the day.

And then in terms of procurement, what was really great is we have this, the strength of the tenant community that brings them together, and they were sharing procurement, they were changes, they were doing multiple supplies across the building to try and reduce travel. And supplier delivery footprints as well. So that worked incredibly well.

Becky: And so just wanted to share with you a couple of— the Birkin project that we did over a number of years was multi-award-winning, and I just wanted to share these quotes because I think it's really important from a heritage perspective. This particular— this one around demonstrating that heritage restoration can enhance energy efficiency within assets. We started this in 2018 when actually sustainability really wasn't a thing. We called them Eco-Heritage Officers and nobody thought— they thought it was rather pointless. For us, it's always been about reducing our impact on the environment holistically, of which carbon footprint is a key focus. But also this bit about overseeing the highest level of restoration work.

When we do energy efficiency upgrades, it tends— it can be done because of cost pressures, you know, at a lower quality because of lower cost, and it's just to employ you at this point, particularly from a landlord perspective. Reframing it as an investment is so important. We found our yields increased, the asset value of the building has increased, we had no void periods, we have had— we haven't had to offer any incentives because we're meeting needs through energy efficiency.

We're able to demonstrate energy resilience, helping our tenants reduce their carbon footprint, and demonstrating that willingness, that collaboration, has been a huge benefit financially, business-wise, to us. It is absolutely not a cost, it's completely an investment, and our fellow landlords have used us as an exemplar of how they can and should continue, because those who weren't focusing on sharing and working with their tenants to reduce their footprint have seen a significant fall in asset value as we have this flight to quality that all the larger real estate companies are demonstrating, and the large driver of that is not working landlord and tenant together to reduce carbon footprints.

Becky: So just to finish off, we are delighted that we are so vocal— some people aren't— but so vocal about the role that heritage sector can play in reducing energy efficiency and how landlords and tenants must work together to achieve carbon reduction. We cover a whole range of national conferences, and we're absolutely thrilled that the Handbook of Carbon Management uses our energy efficiency project at the Birkin Building as its case study in its Decarbonising Real Estate chapter.

Becky: As we come to a close, I hope you found it helpful. I feel it's a bit of a whistle-stop tour, but just really wanted to share from our experience as landlords, primarily, but then forced almost into the consultancy route because we have such experience as landlords, but being proactive and that collaborative approach that we espouse. We've had so many clients come to us and ask for help because as a landlord, it is quite unusual to take that viewpoint, or it was historically. Thankfully, it's not now.

But on that, the 3 takeaways I'd like to share is that this partnership is even more vital in heritage buildings where there's often less understanding about how those buildings work. And it's easy to get into inappropriate and costly interventions, and that we need sympathetic retrofits. We have fewer skilled workers in the heritage sector, and so we need to reflect on that as well. And that all combines to be needing to act now.

Okay, we need to spread the cost. We know the regulations are coming down. We know there's external pressures. With these fewer skilled contractors available, and all the regulations, please don't leave it as long as you think you can, because it will come back to bite you.

And then that point around don't assume anyone understands this. This is quite complex. There's so much competing information around there, so please do take advantage of and signpost either colleagues, your managers, your landlord to sector-specific advice, because there's a wealth of it out there. Not just people like myself to help, but, you know, the fantastic work that Historic England does to help reduce overwhelm and drive that collaboration.

Becky: And so I'd just like to signpost this for you, guidance that Historic England has just published involving guidance, fact sheets, resources to help cultural and heritage organisations develop decarbonisation plans for their heritage buildings. And alongside this, HE is also currently running a series of webinars, of which this is the second. To walk through the different steps in the decarb process. And as Sarah said, the links will be shared at the end.

Becky: So it just leaves it for me to say thank you very much for your time this afternoon and your questions I can see popping up. Please do connect with me on LinkedIn or email me either with any questions that you would like to share outside of this session, or if you think we can explore how we can help you with energy efficiency, energy resilience, and climate resilience. In your building or any training behaviour change programmes, please do get in touch. I'll hand over to Sarah now for the Q&A.

Thank you!

[Q/A Session]

Sarah: Thank you, Becky, that was fantastic!

Yep, we do have a few questions in the chat which I'll just run through. I think it was actually put in the chat, but I'd made a note of this. Can you give any advice on how from a tenant's point of view you would go about approaching your landlord to be more carbon conscious? How do you start the conversation, I think, is the question really.

Becky: Money. Stranded assets. Stranded asset is the phrase to use. I'm not saying that all landlords are only driven by that, but they're landlords because they're investors, ultimately. You're investing because it's a return on the building, and so you have to speak that language. So this is why they couldn't understand us as we've always had, we've always come from a tenant perspective, so it's a no-brainer for us. But if you're uncertain, that first step is to say there is a clear flight to quality driven by energy efficiency needs.

And so if you as a landlord want people to rent your building, you are going to need to do this. That is the fundamental bottom line. We can wax lyrical about saving the planet as much as we like, But if we're going to be brutally honest about this, for the majority of landlords, that is it. But I don't want, I don't want people to think that landlords are mercenary. Far from it. Some are, yes, of course they are, but a lot aren't.

And that's why I want to get across that point that they don't know what's happening. There's so many regulations, there's so many changes, so many pauses. It's really difficult to understand. I must admit, I started this in 2017-18, as I say, when it wasn't really a thing. People thought we were insane. The world has changed so quickly, and that's why I feel that, that split incentive issue and the constant narrative pitching landlords against tenants, I think, is unfair.

Both now can absolutely benefit from reducing the carbon footprint as a business risk and continuity issue, and I think that's the driver. I wouldn't— and I'll probably get told off for this, particularly with my carbon literacy training hat or whatever, but, you know, for a lot of people, the co-benefit is the saving the planet. It's about improving your energy efficiency for cost and resilience.

Sarah: Yeah, and I guess it boils down to talking their language, to talking something that they will understand. Yeah, and that actually leads nicely on to a question that I thought of when we were going through, is, as a tenant, how do you keep up with the changes, the EPC changes and all of that? Where do you find the information? And if that happens during your tenancy, how is that addressed? This might be me being a bit naive.

Becky: No, no, it's fine. So EPC changes, you have to do what we all do and go on DuckDuckGo as a good carbon-efficient search. Others are available but less, less good with the footprint. Government is putting out regulation updates regularly.

As I say, we should have had the non-domestic ones confirmed by now. We haven't. So it's keeping an eye on government updates on where they are, industry updates. Industry is very keen to know what's happening, so there's a lot of conversation around it, a lot on social media. They post comments around what's happening, but it is unfortunately in a state of flux and uncertainty, and what that does is it drives people to go, I'm just going to wait, and it's that waiting that's the problem because that's going to cause— particularly in the heritage sector where we, you know, we do have a skill shortage that's not going to be overtake, solved very quickly by the nature of the beast. That's why I implore thinking about it as an investment and starting now.

Sarah: Being proactive.

Becky: Being proactive because again, it's never going to get any cheaper, and if you hold off that's just going to be far more expensive. It's going to have a far greater opportunity cost. In terms of EPC changes, in, in terms— how do you keep up if they– if the ratings change during your tenancy? It's when the EPC expires that you need to have it redone. So that's why, what some of the suggestions are is that actually if you do it now, if you get your EPC done now where you know more before the new carbon factors and other things come in, then in theory that will last for those 10 years.

So whatever requirements are within those 10 years, you've secured your rating now. Yeah, that, that's the suggestion there. You don't, you don't have to go, oh, that's changed, we must do that sort of mid-tenancy. You're kind of locked in for that. And under lease, my understanding is lease renewal doesn't require another EPC. It's only a brand new lease. So if you were to stay you've secured it because it's supposed to tell you what the energy efficiency looked like at the start of your tenancy.

Sarah: Thank you! One of the questions that came up was, what are your experiences of green leases and structured clauses?

Becky: I'm a massive fan of green leases. I'm a process bunny. I like people to know where they stand. I very much would encourage tenants— sounds a bit mental, but I would encourage tenants to be using light to medium green leases and encouraging that as a starter conversation. And they are starting to ever so slowly come in. We know from solicitors we've worked with and surveyors that conversations are starting. It's still very new, this, you know, this whole thing is new.

So the uncertainty again, but that proactivity, because if you can get light or green conversations or clauses or leases, sub-clauses in, then that hopefully takes the pressure off everyone to have to go down that mandated route later on.

So again, it is always coming back to that proactivity, and it might seem a bit crazy, but then you can prove— if you're a tenant, you can prove to an investor, or maybe you're tendering for work, tendering for funding, you can prove that you're committed. It's not just, oh, hi, yeah, we do that, and that whole greenwashing aspect. It's actually evidencing quite clearly, which I think is really, really useful.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Last question in the chat, and if anybody's got any more questions before we wrap up, if you just want to pop them in the questions for presenters, that would be great. But somebody's asked, where can they find out more about offering carbon literacy to their tenants? I'm going to put something in the chat here. We offer— Historic England offer carbon literacy training, and we have sessions coming up over the next couple of months, and I put that in the chat.

The other one is Carbon Literacy themselves, so carbonliteracy.com, their website, have others for— maybe not for companies that are not heritage-based. And I also— there's no other questions coming in, but one of the things I wanted to just pick up on as an end is you mentioned about cooling uses 4 times more energy than heating, which I thought was really interesting. And I am definitely looking forward to summer and the rain stopping. And like we used to do at school, if it gets really hot, I'm gonna go and work on the lawn on the patio.

Becky: And this is absolutely it. So in Japan— I didn't say this, did I? In Japan, when the temperature reaches a certain level, everyone is mandated to wear linen. It's a national thing. You wear linen because it makes your skin breathe the best. And it, and it's that I mean, I do a lot of behaviour change work because it is that human thing of going, well, I want to dress like this. Well, you can't. It's too hot or it's too cold. Just dress appropriately. It's almost like we want to make a point of somehow being able to control this that we simply can't.

And as we are moving more towards overheating, we really need to understand how in offices, particularly heritage buildings where we are working possibly within the parameters processes of listing or restricted how we can tweak our buildings, that we are taking this more passive, non-mechanical, personalized approach, because that's what's going to help. Because again, just flicking— so it doesn't matter whether it's renewable or not, you're still trying to reduce being able to flick the switch in the first place and move away from that Jevons paradox of, oh, it's all going to be renewable, so it's fine.

Well, actually, it's still going to cost you a fortune, and it might be sabotaged, or the data centres might restricts how much you can use. So the more we can manage our overheating that we know is coming in a passive way, I think it just makes more sense. But I would say that because that's what I do, that's what I love.

Sarah: No, but I think we, I think we all are beginning to see, or should be seeing, that the soft changes that we can make, the changes that don't cost us money, the behavioural changes, actually can have a really big impact.

Becky: Huge impact.

Sarah: And they don't cost vast amounts of money, and it's something that everybody can quite quickly do. I mean, this comes into the carbon literacy training, as we both know, Becky. It's part of it when you do your action plan pledge at the end of it. The changes that you can do yourself, although it feels like the emphasis is being put on you to do the change, actually they're the really simple ones. They're not going to cost much.

Becky: They don't cost much. And also, particularly around the building health point is that symbiosis of energy efficiency, but also health. You know, the health benefits of taking that approach mentally and physically are proven. They've been proven for decades. And which is why I love that side of things, the whole building physics impact on your body. It's not just about saving the planet. It's very much about saving you and that whole ESG approach, which is looking after the people as well as the environment, the building – the buildings we're in support those equally. So it's so important to approach it in that way.

Sarah: And I think that's a really good place to stop because we're on time. And thank you so much, Becky, that's been really fantastic, really interesting. This is being recorded, so we will have it on our website in time on the webinar page.

So thank you!