Sustainability
Sustainability
Creating sustainable and energy efficient homes, neighbourhoods and a sustainable business is fundamental to delivering our purpose.
Our plan outlines three key areas that we’re focussing our sustainability goals around:
- Homes and Places
- People and Skills
- Our operations and supply chain
These have been shaped by feedback from events with residents and colleagues.
Our plan
Our sustainability plan [PDF] shares our vision of how we will include sustainability in all aspects of our work, such as in our existing homes, new homes, offices and operations. Our vision is to ensure that by 2050, homes are at Net Zero Carbon or, where that’s not achievable, we’ll meet the same objective through a mix of energy efficiency, environmental action and carbon offsetting.
Our approach
From our 2022 Group Carbon Audit, we know that 93% of organisational carbon emissions originate from our housing stock. With responsibility for over 10,000 homes, our strategy for building, retrofitting and maintenance will be key to managing these emissions. We are working to achieve the government’s target of all homes achieving EPC Band C by 2030. At the end of March 2024, 67% of our homes are at Band C and we have clear plans in place to increase this over the coming years.
Our approach is “fabric first” and we have committed £3.2m over the next financial year to sustainability improvements, with additional funding through the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. During 23/24 we spent in excess of £3.4m on energy efficiency and sustainability improvements.
Working in partnership
We’re working in partnership with three other Hertfordshire-based organisations: B3Living, Watford Community Housing and Dacorum Borough Council.
Together we’ve formed the Greener Herts Partnership.. This partnership will enable us to work more sustainably to improve the energy efficiency of our homes, follow more environmentally friendly construction techniques and adopt other more sustainable ways of working.
Following the Greener Herts Partnership’s successful bid to the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF), we secured over £5 million to make settle homes more energy efficient.
22nd March 2024 marked one year since we were awarded the funding. At the end of the year we had completed assessments to nearly 600 settle homes, completed 443 measures in 198 homes and fully completed improvement works to 45 settle properties. We look forward to completing our commitments during the year ahead, with several hundred more settle homes set to benefit from these improvement works, making them warmer and more comfortable to live in.
Working with residents
We know that the best way to achieve our plan is to involve you – our residents, so we’ve created the Green Panel. It’s made up of residents from across the Greener Herts partnership areas and will be central in helping us achieve our sustainability goals.
If you’d like to join, visit our get involved page.
Energy Efficiency Programme – for residents
You may have been contacted by settle asking if we can survey the energy efficiency of your home. We plan to make homes more energy efficient and comfortable for our residents, which will help save on fuel bills reduce carbon emissions and move towards our target of settle homes reaching at least Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Band C by 2030.