Interview: Suzanne Coyle, former Irish dancer and now director at Glasgow-based energy services firm Union Technical

She sees transferable skills between the discipline and the business world, saying she tells parents of the Irish dancing school she also runs that students are learning not just the steps, but furthermore “teamwork, dedication, self-motivation, things that you can tie into any walk of life”. And she feels it herself gave her a mindset and work ethic “that have assisted me in how I operate now, I would like to think”.

Dancing is also one way to keep warm, the latter a key part of the remit of Union Technical that works with the UK Government’s Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme (designed to tackle fuel poverty and help reduce carbon emissions) to provide free or part-funded energy-efficiency services in the UK, and says it has helped thousands of customers save money on their energy bills. Examples of the cost-of-living crisis still continuing to bite include Citizens Advice Scotland recently stating that more than a quarter of a million Scots have used commercial credit like credit cards or loans to pay energy bills this year.

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Union Technical is now firing up a major period of expansion as it approaches its tenth anniversary this December. “It’s an exciting but also important year for us in terms of everything that we're looking to do,” says Coyle.

It was founded by entrepreneurially minded schoolfriends Owen Coyle (Suzanne’s brother) and Michael Sweeney, who are both also directors of the family-owned and run organisation. They had worked in the renovation and building industry, and saw a gap in the market for an “all-encompassing” offering covering energy-efficiency renovations. The trio are “three slightly different people, slightly different personalities, so it just works very well together,” says Suzanne Coyle.

In December it announced that it had undertaken a major hiring spree, boosting its 85-strong team of retrofitting and energy specialists with ten recruits across its finance and administration, compliance, customer service, and design teams. Businesswoman Coyle at the time said: “Investing in our team is of the highest priority for us, and will allow us to help more customers as we tackle the ongoing challenge of fuel poverty and inadequate housing. We’re also extremely proud to be creating employment that will support the local economy. We welcome our new team members, and look forward to working together as we adapt to an ever-changing housing landscape.”

And she says its HQ is now “pretty much bursting at the seams”, with work starting imminently to double both its floorspace and yardspace there, as it looks to grow its workforce to about 120 by the end of this year.

The firm works with homeowners, tenants, local authorities including 15 Scottish councils, and social and private landlords to deliver a broad range of relevant services throughout the UK, and sees the public sector in particular gaining significant traction.

Recent contracts encompass a £1.5 million retrofit (upgrading a home so that it uses less energy) of almost 300 homes in Dumfries, a £540,000 project to upgrade 18 homes in Skye, which were built in the 1980s and are managed by Trust Housing Association, to help address the island’s ongoing housing crisis.

It has also completed an £860,000 project in Scone, Perthshire, to turn 25 homes constructed in 1968 and owned by housing association Hanover Scotland whose tenants are older people. Union Technical says the latter was another example of its Smarter Homes project, involving a “whole-house approach” including full roof extensions to accommodate new external wall insulation, and installing solar panels and high heat retention storage heaters. And Coyle states that the properties were previously facing demolition, while the before and after pictures of the work show how the firm can “rejuvenate” homes, while it also likes to source local labour and merchants.

The UK Green Building Council says the country has one of the “oldest and leakiest housing stocks in western Europe, possibly in the world”, and it highlights how 29 million homes will by 2050 need retrofitting, but says the task is also “one of the biggest opportunities the UK has to reduce carbon emissions whilst tackling the cost-of-living crisis, energy security, and levelling up”.

However, retrofitting is seen by some as expensive and complex, while Coyle says there is a lack of college teaching of retrofitting, and a lack of funding in Scotland compared to England for industry training, “which is a bit of a barrier”. The firm recently took on five trainee domestic energy assessors, and is upskilling them from scratch. Amid the UK’s engineering and construction workforce being found to be 14 per cent female, the quintet include a woman called Holly, while also on the books of Union Technical is a Shannon who came in for an admin role but has since progressed to become a retrofit assessor after being trained by the business.

Coyle’s own career also saw her joining the business in an admin role, after leaving university and considering becoming a PE teacher, “and the rest is history”. She has now been there for 12 years, having gradually become more responsible for its wider operations, “our business and our people”, and becoming a director in 2020. “It's an exciting industry to be in,” she says.