Delivery challenges of launching a voluntary house assessment program

Delivery challenges of launching a voluntary house assessment program

Authors:

Hugh Bartram

Organisation of Presenter:

Department of Land, Environment, Water and Planning, Australia

Abstract:

The accepted understanding of the quality of Victorian residential properties is that the quality of the building fabric and fixed appliances is generally ‘poor’. This understanding is based on anecdotal experience or small sample studies rather than empirical data. This identified information gap demonstrates a clear need for government to develop a method to support better understanding of the quality of residential properties.

In response to this identified need, the Victorian government has developed a web-tool for objectively assessing, rating and comparing the as-built energy efficiency of residential properties – the Residential Efficiency Scorecard.
The Scorecard will enable a trained and accredited energy assessor to record details of the fixed household features and building fabric of the property and generates a rating of the energy efficiency, assesses the performance of the property during extreme weather events, benchmarks fixed appliances against best in class and provides guidance of what changes can be made to the property to improve its rating.

The Scorecard will also facilitate the provision of clear, concise and comparable information to policy makers on the energy performance and structure of residential properties

The development of a robust web-tool to perform this function is just one component of delivering a high quality policy outcome. Designing and delivering the program’s roll out, growth and ongoing success poses numerous challenges. Attempts to launch similar program have encountered issues which impeded a successful launch such as too much focus on the technical data requirements, a lack of user friendly data inputs for assessors or difficult to understand outputs for householders that had inhibited their establishment and ongoing program viability.

This presentation will explore the key program design and delivery decisions considered during the lead up to the launch of the Scorecard program, with a particular focus on choices made to mitigate issues raised during stakeholder feedback or raised by review of existing, similar programs.