The homes we provide for our customers come in all shapes and sizes. They also vary in their age and how they are built. Because building standards and technology have improved over the years – especially when it comes to sustainability – many of our older homes don’t perform as well as newer ones on the energy front. This can make older homes more expensive to heat and less comfortable to live in.
Because both our customers’ wellbeing and the planet matter to us, we’re committed to improving our least energy efficient homes. Our sustainability strategy sets out our plan for all our homes to meet energy performance certificate (EPC) level C by no later than 2030 with a longer-term target of all our homes being carbon net zero by 2050. To do this we’ll need a range of measures but with a focus on better insulation and greener-energy and heating systems.
This home improvement work – retrofitting - can be expensive but we’re making great progress thanks to our success in applying for government sustainability grants. This included an extra £3m from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund in March 2023 which will help us upgrade 300 more of the worst-performing homes.
We’ve been working hard this year to engage our customers in our retrofitting plans. The work can be disruptive and because we can’t upgrade every home all at once we think it’s important that customers understand what our plans involve and how and when it might affect them.
Thanks to the input of our My Voice online community members, we have pulled together a set of letters as well as a leaflet and online material specifically to keep customers well informed when their home is chosen for retrofitting. My Voice members gave us lots of great feedback and all our communication tools were improved as a result.
If you want to join My Voice and help to shape our work you can do so here. You can also read more about our work with customers on retrofitting here.
