Asset Decarbonisation & Retrofit DPS

A Dynamic Purchasing System is an open procurement vehicle that allows new suppliers to join at any point during its lifetime. This is the key difference from a framework, where the list of suppliers is fixed when the framework is tendered and cannot change for the duration of the agreement.

For retrofit and decarbonisation procurement, this matters because the market is evolving rapidly. New heat pump manufacturers, insulation specialists, PAS-qualified coordinators, and monitoring technology providers are entering the market continuously. A framework tendered two years ago may not include the businesses that are best placed to deliver your programme today. A DPS keeps the supply chain current by allowing new entrants to apply, be evaluated, and become available for future competitions.

The other key difference is pricing. On a framework, suppliers typically submit prices at the point of tender and those prices apply for the framework term. On a DPS, you set your own pricing structure and evaluation criteria for each individual procurement, giving you more flexibility to tailor the commercial approach to each project. Inprova supports you with specification development, tender management, and evaluation for every procurement through the DPS, so the additional flexibility does not mean additional burden on your team.

PAS 2035 is the overarching specification for the retrofit of domestic-standard buildings. It defines the roles (retrofit coordinator, retrofit assessor, retrofit designer), the process (assessment, design, installation, monitoring), and the quality standards that funded retrofit programmes must follow. It’s a condition of grant funding across a range of programmes, from the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund to Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme-funded domestic elements and other funded retrofit routes.

The DPS supports PAS 2035 compliance through Category 1 (PAS Services), which provides a procurement route for all the professional roles and services the standard requires. This includes retrofit coordinators who manage the end-to-end process, retrofit assessors who survey properties and identify appropriate measures, retrofit designers who specify the technical solution, and the project management and quality assurance services that sit around them.

Importantly, PAS 2035 requires that the retrofit coordinator is independent from the installer. This means you may need to procure the coordination role separately from the installation work. The DPS structure supports this because you can run separate competitions under different categories: one for PAS services and another for the installation works. Inprova’s team can advise on the most appropriate procurement structure to satisfy PAS 2035 requirements while keeping the process as straightforward as possible.

NHS England has committed to reaching net zero for emissions it directly controls by 2040, and for its wider supply chain by 2045, among the most ambitious decarbonisation targets of any public sector organisation in the UK. NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland have each set their own net zero commitments and timelines. From April 2023, all new NHS England contracts above £5 million per annum require suppliers to publish a Carbon Reduction Plan, and this requirement is expanding to cover all centrally procured contracts regardless of value from April 2027, including Scope 3 supply chain emissions. For estates and facilities teams managing large, often ageing hospital and clinic buildings, the procurement challenge is significant wherever in the UK you’re based: replacing fossil fuel heating systems in occupied clinical environments, improving building fabric without disrupting patient care, and evidencing carbon reduction to your national health body and trust or health board members.

This DPS provides NHS and health bodies with a compliant procurement route covering the full retrofit lifecycle. Our Net Zero Consultancy category includes the specialist engineering and architectural services needed to design retrofit solutions for complex healthcare buildings with specific ventilation, infection control, and service continuity requirements. Lot 4 covers commercial-scale heating and technology installation for the larger plant rooms and district systems common in hospital estates. Lot 1 provides PAS-qualified coordination and assessment services. Because you set your own specification and evaluation criteria for each competition, you can tailor requirements to the specific operational constraints of working in a healthcare environment, including out-of-hours delivery, clinical decant planning, and infection control protocols.

The Education Estates Strategy, published in February 2026, commits £38 billion from 2025-26 to 2029-30 to transform the education estate across England. Within that commitment, £710 million is allocated specifically for renewal and retrofit, with climate resilience and energy efficiency identified as strategic priorities. The Strategy also signals a shift from reactive maintenance to proactive estate management, with new national estate management standards and annual reporting requirements arriving from autumn 2026. For schools, multi-academy trusts, and colleges in England, this means decarbonisation is no longer a discretionary aspiration. It’s becoming a reporting obligation backed by significant funding. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland each run their own education capital investment programmes, and the same procurement challenge applies wherever your school estate is based.

The procurement challenge for education institutions is delivering retrofit works across dispersed sites, often within tight holiday windows, and frequently without dedicated procurement or energy management resource. A multi-academy trust managing thirty school buildings needs a procurement route that works at portfolio scale without requiring a separate tender for each site. This DPS provides that route. Lot 3 covers the fabric-first measures (wall insulation, loft insulation, windows, doors) that most school buildings need. Lot 4 covers low-carbon heating installation, including heat pumps and solar thermal systems increasingly funded through Great British Energy initiatives. Lot 1 provides the PAS coordination and assessment services that funded programmes require. Inprova’s team supports the full process, from specification development through to contract award and ongoing management, so schools and trusts without in-house procurement expertise can access the funding and deliver the work compliantly.

The retrofit sector faces a well-documented skills shortage. The Construction Industry Training Board estimates that thousands of additional workers are needed to meet the UK’s decarbonisation targets, and competition for qualified retrofit coordinators, insulation installers, and heat pump engineers is intense. For procurement teams, this means the traditional approach of running a standalone tender and expecting a strong field of bidders may not deliver the results it once did.

The DPS addresses this challenge in two ways. First, because new suppliers can join at any time, the supply chain is not frozen. As new businesses qualify, recruit, and build capacity, they can be admitted to the DPS and become available for your competitions. This is particularly relevant for retrofit training providers and PAS-qualified professionals, where the pool of accredited individuals is growing but was very small when most existing frameworks were tendered.

Second, Category 9 (Retrofit Training Academy) provides a procurement route for upskilling your own workforce. Rather than competing for scarce external capacity, you can invest in training your in-house teams and existing contractors in retrofit skills, PAS 2035 roles, and the practical competencies that your programme needs. This includes technical training, safety training, workforce development programmes, and competency benchmarking. For organisations with direct labour organisations or long-term contractor relationships, building internal retrofit capability through training is a strategic investment that reduces dependence on a constrained external market.

One of the most common mistakes in retrofit procurement is treating insulation and heating as separate projects. PAS 2035 requires a whole-house approach precisely because the measures interact. Installing a heat pump in a property that has not been insulated will result in higher running costs, poorer performance, and resident dissatisfaction. Conversely, insulating a property without upgrading the heating system misses the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions from the heating source.

The DPS is structured to support integrated delivery. Our Whole Property Retrofit category provides a single procurement route for contractors who deliver both fabric and heating measures as a coordinated programme. This is the simplest approach where you want one supplier to manage the entire retrofit for a property or group of properties.

Alternatively, you can procure fabric measures through lot 3 and heating through lot 4 as separate work packages, provided the PAS 2035 retrofit coordinator (procured through Lot 1) ensures the measures are designed to work together. This approach gives you more flexibility to appoint specialists for each element, but requires stronger programme management to coordinate the sequencing and ensure the whole-house design intent is maintained through installation.

Inprova’s team can advise on the right procurement structure depending on the scale of your programme, the delivery model your organisation prefers, and the PAS 2035 requirements that apply to your funding source.

Local authorities manage the broadest range of building types in the public sector: offices, leisure centres, libraries, depots, care homes, community centres, and, where stock is retained, council housing. Each building type has a different energy profile, a different set of constraints on when and how retrofit works can be delivered, and a different funding route. A leisure centre with a large swimming pool has fundamentally different heating and ventilation requirements to an office block, a Victorian library, or a 1960s school. Running a separate procurement for each building type is slow, expensive, and fragments the supply chain.

This DPS provides a single compliant procurement vehicle that works across the full range of local authority building types. The nine categories cover everything from initial survey and assessment through to installation, monitoring, and training, for both domestic and non-domestic buildings. In England, the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme provides grant funding for energy efficiency improvements in public buildings; Scotland’s Public Sector Heat Decarbonisation Fund provides the equivalent route north of the border, and the DPS covers all eligible measure types under either scheme. For English councils managing the Libraries Improvement Fund (£27.5 million allocated to English local authorities, with projects required to begin between April and July 2026), the DPS provides the procurement route to mobilise quickly within tight funding timescales. Inprova’s team can help you prioritise buildings, structure a phased programme that matches your capital allocation cycle, and ensure that each competition is tailored to the specific building type and funding conditions, without starting the procurement process from scratch each time.

From April 2023, all suppliers bidding for UK central government contracts above £5 million per annum must publish a Carbon Reduction Plan (CRP) confirming their commitment to achieving net zero by 2050. This requirement is expanding: from April 2027, it will apply to all centrally procured contracts regardless of value and will include Scope 3 supply chain emissions. For NHS England, the same requirement applies to NHS-procured contracts, with NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland each setting their own supply chain sustainability expectations. The practical effect is that any public sector organisation letting significant contracts needs to be confident that its supply chain can meet these requirements, and that its own estate decarbonisation programme demonstrates progress.

The DPS supports both sides of this equation. When you procure retrofit and decarbonisation works through the DPS, you’re investing in the physical measures that reduce your organisation’s direct carbon emissions, which strengthens your own carbon reporting and progress towards net zero. At the same time, the DPS supply chain includes suppliers who have been evaluated on their capability to deliver decarbonisation works, meaning you’re appointing contractors who understand the carbon reduction agenda, not just the technical installation.

Our Net Zero Technology Solutions category provides the monitoring and measurement tools that evidence whether installed measures are performing as designed. Lot 1 includes energy performance certificate production and assessment services that provide the baseline and post-intervention data needed for carbon reporting. Together, these categories give you the procurement route for both the physical works and the evidence base that CRP compliance and board-level carbon reporting require.

Retrofit funders and regulators increasingly require evidence that installed measures are performing as designed, whatever sector you’re in. Housing providers need to evidence outcomes against funded programmes such as the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund and quality standards such as the Decent Homes Standard, the Welsh Housing Quality Standard, or the Scottish Housing Quality Standard. NHS and health bodies need to evidence progress against national net zero commitments to their boards and regulators. Local authorities and central government bodies reporting under PSDS-funded programmes or the Greening Government Commitments face similar evidence requirements. In every case, the underlying need is the same: EPC data and property-level assessments that show what was predicted at design stage actually happened on site.

Our Net Zero Technology Solutions lot provides a procurement route for the monitoring and digital tools that capture this evidence. This includes BIM modelling and performance measurement tools that allow you to compare predicted and actual energy performance, data aggregation platforms that pull together information from smart meters, sensors, and building management systems, and compliance software that manages the documentation trail for each property.

Lot 1 which features PAS Services also includes energy performance certificate production and the assessment services that provide the baseline and post-intervention data needed to demonstrate improvement. For organisations reporting on decarbonisation outcomes to boards, regulators, and funders, whether housing, education, healthcare, or local authority, the ability to procure both the monitoring technology and the professional assessment services through a single compliant DPS simplifies the process and ensures the evidence trail is complete.

Yes. Lot 6 covers district heating networks, communal heating and cooling systems, biomass installations, solar thermal district heating, and heat recovery infrastructure. This includes concept development and feasibility work through to design, installation, operations, maintenance, and training.

District and communal heating is particularly relevant for housing associations and local authorities managing dense estates or multi-storey blocks where individual property heating solutions are less practical or cost-effective. Replacing a communal gas boiler system with a low-carbon alternative, connecting an estate to a district heat network, or installing a shared ground source heat pump array all fall within this category.

The procurement for district infrastructure tends to be larger and more complex than individual property retrofit, often involving specialist engineering consultancy, significant capital investment, and long-term operational contracts. The DPS accommodates this because you set your own specification, pricing structure, and contract terms for each competition. Inprova’s team can support you with the specialist specification development that these projects require, including pre-market engagement with the contractor community to test capacity and capability before you commit to a procurement approach.

Inprova does not operate as a supplier directory. The DPS is a compliant procurement vehicle with full procurement support at every stage. When you contact us with a requirement, our team works with you to design the procurement solution, develop the specification and tender documentation, manage the competitive process, support evaluation, and provide ongoing contract management after award.

This includes practical support that makes a measurable difference to the quality and pace of your programme: advising on minimum standards and specification requirements, facilitating pre-market engagement with suppliers in your area, structuring evaluation criteria to meet funding conditions, managing clarification questions during the tender period, supporting moderation and award, and carrying out due diligence checks on winning bidders before contract signature.

After award, Inprova provides ongoing supplier management, performance monitoring, and advice on contract variations or issues that arise during delivery. For organisations without large in-house procurement teams, this support effectively acts as an extension of your team. For organisations with experienced procurement functions, it provides specialist retrofit category knowledge and additional capacity during peak procurement periods.Our volume of activity means our team understands the retrofit supply chain, pricing trends, and delivery challenges at a level that individual organisations procuring occasionally cannot match.