Your home
Watching our carbon footprint
We as a business are well aware of the impact we have on the environment.
Whether it’s building and maintaining homes, visiting schemes, attending events or printing materials to share information, we know the world’s resources are finite and its environment is in a delicate balance.
We are committed to reducing our carbon footprint and finding more ways to work sustainably which can not only reduce the impact we have on the environment, but can also help save money which can be reinvested into improving services for our customers.
Here’s a quick round up of some of our sustainability projects we’ve been involved in during 2020-21:
Big Energy Saving Week
In January 2021 we supported Big Energy Saving Week and spoke to around 25,000 customers about things they can do save money on their energy bills and tips and advice on using energy more efficiently.
New homes; new trees
In 2018, we partnered with the Community Forest Trust and committed to planting a new tree for every house we build as well as donating £50 to the trust which they use to plant even more trees and help communities connect with nature.
With the average house using about five and a half trees worth of timber to build, this scheme helps us to offset the resources we use while also helping to tackle the housing crisis.
In 2020-21, we built 671 new homes, meaning that we helped to replace around 4,000 trees last year - taking our total to more than 12,000 since the scheme began.
Setting high standards
We submit our performance data every year to SHIFT and we were pleased to achieve the silver standard in 2020-21; next year we’ll be going for gold.
In July 2020, we commissioned a report with the Institute for Public Policy Research which revealed that around 12 million homes in England need more support to meet net zero targets by 2050 and tackle fuel poverty.
As part of this work, we're committed to playing a part in projects that find cleaner, more efficient energy for our homes. In 2020-21 we fitted around 125 low carbon heating systems (heat pumps) into our homes, taking our total to over 1,000 in our stock.
Partnership working
We are working closely with all our supply chain to make sure that sustainability and environmental best practice is a priority.
We ask for quarterly reports from our contractors about their sustainability efforts, and hosted a conference for all our suppliers to come together to share their ideas on driving down our impact on the environment.