Kate Simpson

Kate is an academic researcher with a focus on housing, energy and indoor environments. Kate joined Care and Repair as a trustee in 2022.

Kate is learning from Care & Repair’s work bringing together adaptation, weather proofing and energy efficiency installations (retrofit), to provide safe and comfortable homes. Kate brings insight from previous research on retrofit including fuel poverty alleviation, resident experiences and builders’ capabilities and motivations.

During the cost-of-living crisis Kate has been working on research in UK shelter homes, to understand older residents’ experiences with digital wellbeing devices in their home, and with digital energy controls. This led to Kate realising the frequent disconnect between decision making for wellbeing and energy efficiency strategies.

Kate’s interest in retrofit began during her BSc in Building Surveying at Leeds Beckett University. While working in housing maintenance she realised we were missing opportunities to reduce the energy demand of our homes, and potentially improve comfort and indoor conditions, and then undertook an MRes and PhD on energy demand at Loughborough University. She has also worked at the Centre for Sustainable Energy.

Kate disseminates research evidence widely. In Leeds, Kate is part of the Same Skies group who published ‘A Warm and Climate Friendly Home for Everyone in West Yorkshire’, and Climate Action Leeds Housing Group; Nationally, she engages policy and contributed to the Low Energy Transformation Initiative’s ‘Climate Emergency Retrofit Guide’. Kate also engages internationally, such as the ‘Preparing for the European Renovation Wave’ conference in Netherlands (2021). Here is her recent blog post shared by the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment: ‘Retrofit Our Homes to Tackle Multiple Crises’.