Energy performance

There’s a wide range of legal guidelines about 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 want to create sustainable homes, communities and company practices.

How we'll do this | Our Environmental Sustainability Strategy 2020-2023 objectives

Carbon Net Zero by 2050

We want to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 and be accountable for the impact of our activities. We aim to reduce our carbon footprint five percent - 10 percent annually.

Eliminating waste by 2022

Reducing, recycling, and reusing resources as much as we possibly can.

Supporting sustainable communities and workplace

Enabling and encouraging communities and our employees to adopt positive environmental behaviours that also promote happier and healthier lives.

Increasing the efficiency of our homes

We want to take a proactive approach to make sure our existing homes are as future-proof and environmentally sustainable as possible and aren’t causing detriment to the livelihoods and finances of our customers.

What we're doing now | Examples of changes we’ve made

Improving the energy efficiency of our homes

We’re assessing the condition of all our homes with the aim of retrofitting them so that they have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) of C or above by 2030.

Adding electric vehicles to our fleet

We’ve invested in five electric vehicles. In the first two months of using our electric vehicles we offset 372kg of carbon dioxide. This means that there’s 372kg less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there would have been if we’d used petrol or diesel vehicles. We’ve also installed several charging points at our head office. All the electric we use for the charging points is from 100 percent renewable sources.

Sustainable construction and development

We’re embracing new modern methods of construction and new innovative sources of renewable energies, such as air source heat pumps (ASHPs) and photovoltaic (PV) panels in our development programme. We plan to install smart meters to measure energy usage whenever homes are empty, allowing customers to take full control of their energy usage, no matter what their property type.

You can find out more about our environmental sustainability strategy and see how we’re performing around climate change, ecology and resource management by visiting Our commitment to sustainability page.

Tips for your home | Changes you can make to help save energy and money

Heating and hot water

  • Turn the central heating thermostat down by one degree to save 10 percent on your bills. If you have health concerns, are elderly or have small children in the house, don’t go below 18°C.
  • Don’t leave the hot water heating on all the time. It’s much cheaper to set the timer to heat it up for a couple of hours each day.
  • Turn the heating off overnight and when no-one is in the house. Use your central heating timer to do this automatically.
  • Close the curtains when it’s getting dark and tuck them in behind the radiator. This keeps heat in the room.

Home appliances

  • Don’t use the remote control to turn things off – this leaves them on standby. Use the power button on the appliance or turn them off at the plug.
  • Keep your fridge temperature between three and five degrees Celsius.
  • Keep the oven door shut as much as possible when cooking – every time it’s opened, a quarter of the heat is lost.
  • Don’t leave your mobile phone on charge all night, it only needs two or three hours. Why not charge it while you’re eating dinner?

Washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher

  • Only put your washing machine or dishwasher on when full. Two half loads use more water, detergent and electricity than one full load.
  • Wash clothes at 30˚C to save electricity. Most modern fabric detergents work just as well at 30˚C as they do at higher temperatures.
  • Clean the fluff out of your tumble dryer filter every time it’s used.
  • Try to use a low temperature programme on your dishwasher.

Water

  • Only boil as much water as you need in your kettle but make sure the water covers the heating element if you’re using an electric one.
  • Make sure taps are turned off properly. In just one day a dripping tap can waste enough water to fill a bath.
  • An ordinary shower uses 40 percent less water than a bath. If you don’t have a shower, you can buy a bath tap attachment from most DIY stores.

Lighting

  • Always turn lights off when you leave a room and adjust curtains or blinds to allow as much light in during the day.
  • Replace old light bulbs with energy efficient ones or LED bulbs, which use much less electricity.

You can find lots more energy saving tips and information on smart meters in our guide to saving energy around the home. You can find this by registering for or signing into your online account.