Shona Matthews presented yesterday on her paper “Could lenders insulate Britain?: The potential of the annual mortgage statement as a trigger to motivate homeowners to make thermal efficiency home improvements.”

Shona Matthews is a very worthy winner of the Keep Scotland Beautiful award for the dissertation that best promotes sustainability. Read more about the event and the award at the KSB link. We are particularly excited about Shona’s work because it is a nudge that does not rely on government policy – it suggests that there is market opportunity to create a win-win for mortgage providers and their customers.

Shona’s experiment suggests that a simple message could promote retrofitting. She experimentally tested 6 messages placed in the annual mortgage statement that householders receive. One was a control message that simply informed householders that they could contact their mortgage lender to learn more about loans for energy efficient home improvements. The other five messages informed householders of the costs / benefits of improving their home’s efficiency.

Overall, householders who saw one of the cost / benefit messages responded that they were more likely to contact their mortgage lender than did those in the control condition.

There appeared to be differences across groups in receptiveness to the messages – those who did not yet have plans to invest in improving their property’s energy efficiency were especially responsive.

These results come from a sample of 360 mortgage holders answering an online survey. While that’s a very impressive sample for an MSc dissertation, it should give us pause before fully committing to these findings. Still, this dissertation suggest a very promising and unexplored path to sustainability. Shona has identified one of those rare opportunities to deliver positive change that the private sector – in this case banks and their customers – has an incentive to exploit.