Retrofit coordination that survives the audit.

What a retrofit coordinator actually does

The title sounds administrative. The job is not. A retrofit coordinator is the person responsible for making sure that a house, after you have spent money on it, is warmer, drier and safer than it was before — and that it can be proved.

PAS 2035:2023 replaced the 2019 edition, which was withdrawn on 30 March 2025. It makes the coordinator responsible for every project from inception to evaluation, protecting both your interest and the public interest. In practice that comes down to six duties. We carry all six:

1. Agreeing intended outcomes. Before anyone surveys a house, we agree and record with you what the project has to achieve — lower energy use or bills, lower carbon, a better SAP rating, warmer rooms, an end to condensation and mould. Everything that follows is measured against those outcomes.
2. Whole-dwelling assessment. Every home is assessed by a qualified retrofit assessor: construction, condition, defects, damp and mould, heating and hot water, and a checklist inspection of the existing ventilation. Traditionally built homes also get a heritage significance assessment. On large programmes, design can start from assessments of each house type, but every home still has its own assessment before its design is finished.
3. Improvement options and a medium-term plan for every home. We evaluate the options and recommend a package of measures, costed, sequenced and mapped against your funding stream. The 2023 edition makes a medium-term improvement plan mandatory for every dwelling, showing what happens in this phase and what is deliberately left for the next.
4. Design by the right designer. The old A, B and C risk paths are gone. The designer's required qualifications now scale with the work, from a measure specialist for a single measure up to a chartered architect, architectural technologist, CIOB member or chartered building surveyor for three or more interacting fabric measures or any fabric work on high-rise and system-built homes. We offer retrofit design as a service: we subcontract each design to a designer qualified for those measures and that type of building, check their qualifications against the project as the standard requires, and manage the design through to sign-off. Responsibility for the design itself rests with that qualified designer, and every fabric project gets an airtightness and air leakage testing strategy.
5. Recorded site inspections. We brief the installers on the design and installation sequence before work starts, then inspect during installation — in person for anything beyond the simplest measures, and wherever one measure connects to another. Every inspection is recorded in writing with photographs. Any non-compliance is reported in writing to the contractor and to you, and escalated to TrustMark if it isn't put right.
6. Handover, advice and evaluation. Handover to the residents (and to you, where you're the landlord), retrofit advice they can actually use, a basic evaluation of every project against the intended outcomes, lodgement with TrustMark, and the property-level evidence pack your funder and your auditor will ask for.

Why sequencing is the risk

The single most expensive mistake in domestic retrofit is insulating a building without dealing with how it breathes. Insulation raises internal surface temperatures and reduces uncontrolled air leakage — both good — but the moisture that was previously escaping through draughts now has nowhere to go.

In practice that means ventilation is designed at the same time as the fabric measures, not bolted on afterwards; that the heating system is sized against the post-retrofit heat loss rather than the pre-retrofit one; and that the order of works reflects how the building behaves, not the order the installers happen to be available.

Funding streams we work with

What you get, per property

• Intended outcomes agreed and recorded with you at inception
• Whole-dwelling retrofit assessment, including a ventilation inspection
• Medium-term improvement plan, costed and sequenced
• Retrofit design, subcontracted to a designer qualified for the measures, with ventilation and airtightness strategies
• Installer briefings and recorded site inspections, with photographs
• Post-installation evaluation and TrustMark lodgement
• A property-level evidence pack that stands up to audit

Procurement

However suits your governance: direct award under threshold, call-off from an existing framework, or as a named subconsultant in someone else's bid. Insurances, accreditations and references go out the same day you ask. We are also happy to support a funding application before any commitment exists — if the bid fails, you owe us nothing.

Related: portfolio EPCs for your funding baseline, and air permeability testing for post-works quality assurance.