.png){kind=logo}
Around one in six adults in England have very poor literacy skills. An estimated 15 to 20% of the UK population, something like 13 million people, are neurodivergent. Add in residents facing digital exclusion, disability, or a personal circumstance that has nothing to do with retrofit but everything to do with how they'll engage with it, and a striking fact emerges: the "typical resident" that most communication plans are quietly built around barely exists at all.
Our research into communication in domestic retrofit puts this plainly: residents face diverse, sometimes volatile life circumstances, and their experience of a retrofit programme is rarely standardised as a result. Most communication planning proceeds as though the opposite were true, one letter, one script, one call structure, applied uniformly and hoped to land. It doesn't, not evenly, and the households it fails first are usually the ones a retrofit programme most needs to reach.
It's easy to treat inclusivity as a matter of being sensitive or patient, a quality some people bring to a conversation and others don't. That framing understates what's actually at stake.
Communication approaches that assume every resident can engage with lengthy letters, technical terminology or digital portals will, by simple arithmetic, leave a meaningful share of households behind. That's not a marginal edge case to be handled by exception. Given the literacy and neurodivergence figures alone, before accounting for language barriers, sensory needs, or a household simply going through a difficult period, a single standard approach was never going to reach everyone it needed to.
The practical effect isn't dramatic. It's quiet. A resident who can't easily process a technical letter doesn't usually call to say so. They disengage, miss a deadline, or seem "hard to reach", and the programme records it as reluctance rather than what it actually is: a communication method that never had a chance of working for that household in the first place.
Adaptability isn't so much a separate skill from the other five in this series as a multiplier on all of them: it determines whether empathy, explanation, and honest expectation-setting actually reach the person they're intended for, or land on a format that household can't use.
In practice, that means noticing early, not assuming. A resident who misses appointments repeatedly, seems evasive on the phone, or gives short, disengaged answers may not be uninterested. They may be finding the format of the conversation genuinely difficult to engage with, and the fix is rarely more persistence in the same format. What usually works instead is a different one entirely: a phone call rather than a letter, a visual guide rather than dense text, more time and fewer questions at once, or simply checking, directly, whether anything about how information is being shared is making it harder to take in.
Gemma Voaden, Senior Manager Net Zero at Together Housing, treats this as an active discipline rather than something to fall back on when a household happens to raise its hand. Her team makes a point of prioritising "silent residents", the households who have gone quiet, rather than letting them settle to the bottom of the pile by default. The residents hardest to reach are usually the ones most likely to be missed by every other part of the programme too, which makes them a priority to find, not a group to write off.
It also means treating the format of communication as seriously as its content. A beautifully clear explanation of a heat pump, delivered as three pages of dense text to a resident with very poor literacy, has effectively delivered nothing. The same explanation, delivered as a short conversation with a visual alongside it, has a genuine chance of landing. The content didn't change. The delivery did, and delivery is where inclusive communication is actually won or lost.
Scale is the honest obstacle. A retrofit programme reaching a handful of streets can afford genuinely tailored, one-to-one engagement. A programme delivering to hundreds of homes a month is under real pressure to standardise, because standardisation is what makes coordination possible across many teams and many households at once.
The problem is that standardisation and inclusion pull in opposite directions unless an organisation deliberately designs for both. Left unmanaged, the pressure to scale produces exactly the single script that fails the residents furthest from its assumptions, precisely the households most likely to need retrofit's benefits most and least likely to have had a good experience of institutions promising to help them before.
There's also a confidence gap that's rarely discussed openly. People are frequently unsure how to adapt a conversation for a neurodivergent resident, a non-English speaker, or someone with a cognitive impairment, not from a lack of care, but from a lack of practice doing it. Without that practice, the safer-feeling default is to deliver the same script to everyone and hope it's adequate, which is precisely the approach the evidence says isn't.
Build more than one format for every important piece of communication from the outset: a plain-language version, a visual version, a version suited to a phone conversation rather than a letter. Treat this as a delivery requirement, not an optional accessibility add-on produced only when someone asks for it.
Train teams to notice disengagement as a signal, not a verdict. A resident who isn't responding is giving the programme information. The question worth asking isn't "why won't they engage," it's "what about how we're communicating isn't working for them."
Make it normal, and expected, for teams to check understanding actively rather than assume it. This matters for every household, but it matters most for the residents a standard approach was least designed around.
And build the confidence to adapt in real time through practice, not policy. Reading a diversity and inclusion policy is not the same as having held a conversation with a resident who needs information presented differently, and noticing, live, that the original approach isn't landing.
Finally, resist the urge to treat adaptation as something only specialists handle. Routing every atypical household to a single, more experienced team member feels efficient, but it means the majority of resident-facing teams never build the skill themselves, and the specialist becomes a bottleneck rather than a safety net. Every role that speaks to residents needs at least a working version of this capability, not just the people whose job title implies it.
A retrofit programme that reaches most residents well but consistently fails the same kinds of households isn't succeeding by a slightly lower margin. It is failing precisely the residents retrofit is meant to help most, often the ones facing the greatest fuel poverty risk and the least capacity to chase down a confusing process on their own.
This is one of six communication skills we explore in full in our research report, The Retrofit Conversation Gap, alongside the wider evidence for how adaptability shapes outcomes across the resident journey. Download the report for the complete findings.
If you want your team to practise adapting a conversation in real time, for a genuinely diverse range of household circumstances, rather than relying on one script for everyone, we've developed interactive role-play scenarios built to do exactly that. Get in touch to find out more.
