Making headway with multiple projects underway
By John Swinney, Sustainability Lead for Greener Herts.
Our sustainability project continues to make good progress. We now have in place all of the planned early actions – with the Greener Herts website now established and various joint working groups set up, with representatives from all three partners working together and sharing unique insights. We have built heat maps showing the energy efficiency of our homes against the government’s seven deprivation indices and the WarmFront project is well advanced.
Indeed, more than 700 surveys have been undertaken by the WarmFront team and 400 plus homes will receive cavity wall insulation for free. This could save customers around £300 a year on their energy bills, at a time when it is vital for many of us to save wherever we can. The works will be paid for from the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) 3 and we are planning a further energy efficiency programme later in the year using ECO 4 funding. We expect ECO 4 to cover a wider range of measures.
On top of that, we are working on our Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) bid, which has to be submitted by the end of October. We’re looking to target improvements to some 1,000 homes across B3Living, settle and Watford Community Housing. This is a key step in the journey towards Net Zero Carbon (NZC). If successful, this bid should secure around £10m of additional funding for the three partners, allowing us to invest more in saving money for customers and safeguarding the environment.
The scale of our ambition is high and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy – the government department responsible for SHDF – has made it clear that they are keen to see consortium bids. We are, therefore, well placed to be a bid winner. There is much to do but the preparatory work in terms of surveys, cost projections, decisions on the best fit measures and so on are progressing at speed. We will continue to report on our progress with the bid.
The other big initiative that has moved forward recently is the establishment of our Greener Herts customer panel. The first meeting with customers from all three partners took place on the evening of Thursday 23rd June. The kick-off session was an opportunity to agree the issues that the panel want to discuss, start to identify any training needs and discuss a programme for involvement, from site visits to product consultation. We want the panel to have a genuine say in how we get to NZC.
Lastly, the Greener Herts presence was clearly visible at the Herts Housing Conference on 24th May. Our contractors had a stand and there was a workshop dedicated to what we are trying to achieve. The workshop was well-attended and the overarching message was around collaboration and co-operation.
NZC is too difficult to take on alone, even if you are a very substantial landlord. It makes no sense to compete for scarce resource and expertise, for limited contractor capacity or to keep learning within one organisation. The idea of sharing underpins the Greener Herts partnership and it was good to see high levels of interest from other landlords across the county in the idea of joining up.
Will the partnership expand? Time will tell… but the case for working together is growing with every hike in energy bills.