We take our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments very seriously, and as an early adopter of the Sustainability Reporting Standard we published our first report in October 2021.
The aim of the standard is to provide a voluntary reporting framework for housing providers to report on their ESG performance in a transparent, consistent and comparable way. This will make it easier for lenders and investors to assess the ESG performance of housing providers, identifying ESG risks and opportunities that will create positive social and environmental outcomes. Lenders and investors, including Lloyds Bank, LGIM Real Assets, M&G and NatWest, have agreed to use the standard in their investment and credit policies, processes and/or product design.
As part of our commitment to the new standard from 2021 we will report against the standard annually. The report highlights the work we are doing as an organisation in relation to standards 48 criteria, covering ESG considerations such as affordability, fire safety and net-zero carbon emissions.
It’s important that our stakeholders and lenders get a clear picture of how Great Places operates as as a modern and innovative business. Being early adopters of the industry-led sustainability reporting standards from 2021 will help unlock further investment to tackle the UK’s deepening housing crisis. But far from having just a financial focus, this is a much wider issue that impacts us all. This year we have worked hard to ensure our colleagues and partners understand the significance of this increasingly important topic, as Phil Elvy and Julie Lynch explain in this video.
Great Places works hard to reduce the environmental impact of our communities and delivery of our services. We remain committed to Carbon Literacy training for all colleagues and are a ‘Platinum Carbon Literate’ organisation, also providing training to a number of other public and private sector organisations.
We recognise that our day-to-day activities have an impact on our environment, be it from the operation of our office buildings to our development programme, the waste that we generate or emissions from our vehicles.
We continue to work with partners on new approaches to making our homes more energy efficient. In 2021 we launched our new Carbon Management Strategy 2021-24, which outlines how we plan to realise our aim of being a net-zero-carbon business by 2038. We’ve already made significant progress in the first few months – as outlined in this short video.
In 2021 we undertook a detailed pilot in Trafford to demonstrate the success of quality assurance in retrofit and lobby for change to how retrofit projects are undertaken. We partnered with Knauf Insulation and Knauf Energy Solutions (KES) to deploy their innovative kit to measure the fabric efficiency of the home and ‘meter’ the savings derived from the retrofit. Following the work, all 28 of the buildings were continuously assessed to deliver information on the improvements to energy efficiency and savings. The results were significant. The energy efficiency of the average home was found to have been improved by 31%. Across all the buildings, energy efficiency improved between 20% to 51%, creating energy savings of between £228 and £660 a year.
