Across Europe, local authorities face increasing pressure to balance two critical priorities: ensuring that the buildings they own or influence are safe, efficient, and fit for purpose as well as meeting ambitious climate and sustainability targets. At SkenarioLabs, we provide the data, insights, and tools to help councils and municipalities understand and manage smarter their full building portfolios, from public and commercial buildings to residential homes.
The Challenge for Local Authorities
Managing diverse building stock is becoming increasingly complex. Councils are dealing with ageing buildings, constrained budgets, and the urgent need to decarbonise. At the same time, they must maintain safe and resilient buildings, upgrade operational facilities, modernise commercial properties, and ensure that residential homes remain affordable and sustainable. Traditional asset management approaches often fall short of providing the complete picture needed for long-term planning.
How SkenarioLabs Supports Councils
At SkenarioLabs we transform raw building data into actionable insights. This includes:
- Full portfolio visibility of building stock performance, from energy efficiency to repair needs.
- Scenario modelling to test the impact of different investment decisions, whether it's retrofitting for carbon reduction, prioritising safety upgrades, or balancing financial sustainability.
- Climate risk analysis to understand vulnerabilities to flooding, overheating, and other climate-related hazards.
- Data-driven reporting to support compliance with government regulations and funding bids.
By integrating financial, environmental, and operational perspectives, we help local authorities build strategies that are sustainable, resilient, and cost-effective.
Partnering with Municipalities Across Europe
Our work with local authorities in Finland and the UK goes beyond one-off projects; we build long-term partnerships that help municipalities plan, fund, and deliver portfolio-wide asset management and large-scale decarbonisation efforts.
Finland: Scaling Digital Transformation in Local Government
Since 2020, SkenarioLabs has been working with a large state-owned company, supporting local authorities and key decision makers in Finland. Together, we've developed and continued to maintain a comprehensive digital platform that enables local authorities to access, update, and analyse their property data. Through this platform, municipalities can understand their building portfolios, track energy performance, identify investment needs, and generate reports that support financial and strategic decision making with ease. Today, more than 200 local authorities use the platform to make data-driven decisions that support more sustainable, efficient, and resilient communities.
Our collaboration continues to evolve through monthly KPI reviews, steering committees, and annual training sessions, ensuring that local authorities always have the latest features, insights, and support. This remains our largest deployment to date: a model example of scalable, sustainable digital transformation for the public sector.
UK: Supporting Decarbonisation at Scale
In the UK, SkenarioLabs has been involved in multiple initiatives helping local authorities accelerate energy efficiency and decarbonisation.
One of these is the DESNZ-funded Green Homes Finance Accelerator project, where we co-created a green finance product to help municipalities identify potential net zero neighbourhood projects within their areas. The project focused on developing digital solutions that bring together mortgage providers and local authorities to explore decarbonisation opportunities at both the portfolio and neighbourhood scale.
We developed a digital platform capable of rapidly analysing large portfolios or entire communities. The platform's analytics provide detailed insights into retrofit costs, long-term energy savings, and financial impacts such as changes to mortgage affordability — enabling smarter, evidence-based decision making. Local authorities can use these insights to prioritise areas that would most benefit from decarbonisation, apply for public or private funding, and plan large-scale community retrofit programmes. By providing actionable data early in the process, the product helps reduce reliance on costly consultancy services and supports local authorities throughout the planning, development, and delivery of decarbonisation strategies.
In Manchester, we are collaborating with a number of local partners, to identify opportunities for solar and battery systems across the city. This project explores the barriers organisations face in adopting renewable technologies and helps the Council define its role in enabling and accelerating local energy transition.
Additionally, in partnership with Arup for the Greater London Authority, we recently completed a project in East London analysing 61,000 non-residential buildings. Our baseline modelling assessed the suitability of different retrofit measures — from light-touch to deep interventions — helping the GLA and local authorities understand the carbon reduction potential, cost implications, and energy performance improvements across the region.
Partnering for Better Outcomes
We believe that local authorities play a central role in driving the transition to a low-carbon, resilient built environment. By equipping them with better data, smarter insights, and more powerful modelling tools, we help local authorities unlock new opportunities, improve the performance of public estates, and deliver long-term value for communities.
If you're a local authority looking to make smarter, more sustainable decisions about your building stock, we'd love to help. Get in touch with our team to explore how SkenarioLabs can support your strategic planning and decarbonisation goals.