COP27, the United Nations summit about climate change, is well underway in Egypt. What happens there can seem like a world away from everyday life, but climate change is affecting us all, in one way or another.
The UK has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, and with 25% of the country’s carbon emissions coming from its homes, we’ve got a big role to play in helping to tackle the problem.
Our customers’ 16,500 homes output approximately 50,000 tonnes of CO2 greenhouse gases a year. We plan to get that number to zero, and that’s going to take a lot of hard work and significant investment.
We want all our customers to have a place they’re proud to call home, a place that’s sustainable, affordable and comfortable. That’s why we’re investing more than £100 million over the next five years in our customers’ homes and places, to make sure they’re fit for the future. And we’ve set aside an additional £8 million to make our homes more energy efficient and reduce the impact of rising energy prices.
We also want to reduce our impact on the environment year on year, not just from our new and existing homes but across our business. We’ve created a customer climate champion role to make sure our customers are part of the conversation, and earlier this year we moved into Yorkshire’s first net-zero workspace. We’re also planning to use new technologies to help our customers to transition to a low-carbon future.
We’re already investing millions of pounds to improve the energy efficiency of some of our existing homes. We recently completed a retrofit project on 30 of our homes in Craven, and at Staxton in North Yorkshire we’re investing £1.3 million to upgrade homes with air source heat pumps, solar panels and external wall insulation.
And we’re already going above and beyond to drive our sustainability agenda. We’ve created our own standard for newly built homes which will see us phasing out the use of gas three years ahead of the targets set out in the government’s Future Homes Standard. This is a positive step, especially given the volatility and soaring prices we’ve seen in the gas market in recent months.
Over the next five years we’re committed to:
- Delivering more retrofit programmes at a bigger scale.
- Making sure every home achieves an energy performance rating of SAP Band C or above by 2030 (SAP is the government approved system for assessing the energy rating for new homes).
- Starting to develop ‘green skills’ in-house and continue to grow this team over the next five years.
- Taking a fabric first approach, which means improving insulation in our homes so that less energy is needed to heat them.
- Removing solid fuel systems in all of our homes and replacing them with low carbon solutions.
- Exploring new, smarter technologies such as battery storage, remote sensors, and new sources of energy such as wind.
We want Yorkshire Housing to lead the social housing sector when it comes to tackling climate change. We’re excited about the future, and confident we can deliver a cleaner, greener future for our customers, our communities and our business.