Our commitment to sustainability

We're an early adopter of the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing. This is a sector-leading commitment which puts us at the forefront of sustainable best practice.

It commits us to reporting on our Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) performance annually, in a transparent, consistent and comparable way.

We’ve produced our fourth ESG Report to inform stakeholders about the work we’re doing and impact we’re making.

We’re committed to sustainability and anticipate that it will play a key strategic role in our future. As a result, we’re keen to embed environmental, social, and governance (ESG) into our financing and are focused on being transparent and accountable to our stakeholders. We've established a Sustainable Finance Framework to demonstrate the next stage of our commitment as we adopt sustainability into our finances. This framework has been externally reviewed and assured by Sustainalytics. You can find out more about the evaluation in their Second-Party Opinion[pdf] 448KB.

Environmental

This examines how we’re performing and planning around climate change, ecology and resource management. It outlines our plans for reaching Net Zero by 2050 and publishes our greenhouse gas emissions. It also includes how we’re improving the energy efficiency of our homes and how we’re helping our customers to become stakeholders in their environmental futures.

Social

This assesses how we treat people in relation to affordability and security, building safety and quality, how we listen to our customers and provide the right kind of support. Plus, it looks at how we transform spaces to build better and more sustainable communities. It includes our work to reduce fuel poverty and to achieve best practice customer complaints handling.

Governance

This section considers how we regulate ourselves and focuses on structure and governance, our Board, employee wellbeing and our supply chain management. It includes continuous organisational risk management to ensure better outcomes for everyone and our commitment to improve the gender pay gap.

To find out more about our governance, visit our How we're run page.

Our Environmental Sustainability Strategy

We’ve launched our Environmental Sustainability Strategy for 2020-2023 [pdf] 1MB, which outlines our actions for the next three years. This is followed by the first phase of a longer thirty-year journey to 2050.

Our Environmental Sustainability Strategy comes from an awareness that all sections of society must act in the fight against climate change. We believe that the housing sector has an integral role in the UK reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

There’s an increasing array of legal guidelines about the environmental performance that housing associations must meet. But we don’t want to simply stop at fulfilling our legal requirements - we want to inspire further environmental action, locally and nationally.

We’ll ensure that the social value we create in our communities is aligned with a wider consciousness of how our decisions impact the environment. We’ll transform the lives of our customers today without compromising our ability to transform the lives of our customers in the future.

We’ll do this by ensuring that we facilitate:

  • sustainable homes;
  • sustainable communities;
  • sustainable corporate practices.

These deliverables will be achieved through our objectives of:

  1. carbon Net Zero by 2050
    We want to achieve carbon Net Zero emissions by 2050 and be accountable for the impact of our activities. We aim to reduce our carbon footprint five - 10 percent annually;
  2. eliminating unnecessary waste by 2022
    Reducing, recycling, and reusing resources as much as we possibly can;
  3. supporting sustainable communities and workplace
    Enabling and encouraging communities and employees to adopt positive environmental behaviours that also promote happier and healthier lives;
  4. increasing the efficiency of our homes
    We want to take a proactive approach in ensuring our existing homes are as future-proof and environmentally sustainable as possible and are not causing detriment to the livelihoods and finances of our customers.