Working in partnership
By John Swinney, Sustainability Lead for Greener Herts.
We are now six months into our sustainability journey. The collaboration between B3Living, settle and Watford Community Housing is holding strong. There is a robustness and confidence in the relationship that is driving progress, evidenced by the willingness to share data, ideas and solutions. Rather than holding us back, working together feels like it is underpinning our momentum.
So where are we?
We have achieved a lot in a short space of time.
We have a joint position statement
We have identified a range of pilot projects
We are bidding for the next round of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund
We are reviewing all of our EPC ratings and have accessed energy company obligation funding to improve energy efficiency across our homes
We have built heat maps which overlay EPC performance on the seven deprivation indices
We have established a collective identity – Greener Herts – with a dedicated external facing website
We have started working to establish our customer green panel
The internal enthusiasm pushing the agenda exists at all levels – Boards, CEOs, finance and technical staff, communications and community leads and so on. There is an excitement about cross-organisation working and a real enthusiasm for sharing tasks.
The mood of co-operation is refreshing and has allowed us to be much further advanced in our thinking, our analysis of data and our agreement and planning of pilot projects than I had envisaged would be possible in such short timescales.
My expectation was that the first few months would focus on building trust and confidence and winning support for ideas and options. The reverse has been true: it has been all about ‘pushing on an open door.’ While there is widespread support for the sustainability agenda it is due credit to the three organisations and their people that they have taken on the mantle for action so easily.
In parallel with the internal positives there has been a huge commitment from the contractors we have engaged with to help and support. While there are good commercial reasons for this, they have all gone beyond what I had anticipated. Maybe it is a characteristic of the sector or possibly the type of people attracted to work in it, but there are real grounds for optimism. Commitments to recruit locally, use local providers and so on are strong and genuine.
I remain hugely optimistic about what we can achieve and the speed with which we can secure change and improvement. The approach has been based on action and doing things rather than talking and thinking about what to do. Clearly, this brings with it some risks but they are far outweighed by the positive outcomes for the 20,000 homes the three associations own and manage – and the people living in them and paying ever escalating energy bills.