Sustainability work recognised with Silver SHIFT status

Work to make our customers’ homes and communities and our business greener has taken another step forward – we have retained Silver status with improved performance in our annual SHIFT assessment.

This is an audit of how we are performing against a series of sustainability targets including carbon emissions associated with our activities, energy and water use, how much waste we recycle, and how ethically we procure goods and services.

The assessment reviews our continuous work to reduce our environmental impact and futureproof our homes and neighbourhoods, helping us meet the targets in our Sustainability Strategy and Big Plan.

Sustainability Homes Index for Tomorrow (SHIFT) is the sustainability standard for the housing sector and an independent assessment and accreditation scheme.

Headlines from our 2022/2023 assessment report include:

• Carbon emissions from our business mileage continue to be among the lowest across all other SHIFT accredited landlords.
• We scored highly for sourcing maintenance materials in a responsible way, plus the amount of waste from repairs and maintenance activities that we divert from landfill puts us in the top 20% of SHIFT accredited landlords.
• Our Customer Sustainability Champions group is proving to be an impactful way to involve our customers in sustainability planning and decision making.

The report highlighted recommendations on ways we can improve our environmental performance, such as:

• Continue energy efficiency improvement work to bring existing homes up to Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C or better.
• Reduce the amount of office waste we generate.
• Further strengthen how we engage with customers about green topics like energy advice, waste recycling and adapting to climate change.

Olivia Greenhalgh, our Sustainability Manager said:

“Retaining our Silver status with improved performance recognises the great progress we have made to become even more sustainable over the past twelve months.

“This includes delivering energy efficiency upgrades to 200 existing local homes - the first of 3,800 to be retrofitted 2023-2028; building 124 new, sustainable homes in Oldham and surrounding areas; and installing solar PV panels at First Place and Primrose Place premises to help reduce our carbon emissions.

"We have also expanded our natural meadows, wildflower plots and native flower spaces to cover 16,000m2; worked with City of Trees to increase the number of trees and diversity of native species in our neighbourhoods and recruited brilliant Customer Sustainability Champions to be part of our journey to name a few.

“SHIFT also helps us focus on how else we can make a positive difference, and we will use the recommendations to help guide our work for the coming year.”