Raven named top sustainable housing provider
Raven Housing Trust has been placed sixth in Housing Digital’s top 30 sustainable housing providers.
Launched this year, the list published by Housing Digital aims to celebrate the efforts the social housing sector is making to help combat the climate crisis and achieve net-zero carbon.
The biggest contributor, by far, to our carbon footprint is our homes, with 98% of our annual carbon emissions generated by heating, lighting and other energy use in our properties.
To achieve sustainability, we are committed to providing homes that are not just environmentally friendly, affordable and easy for our residents to live in, but that we also consider our management and maintenance costs, so they are affordable and efficient for us to run as well.
We’ve looked closely at how we can improve the efficiency of our existing homes, becoming the first housing association in the UK to publicly announce the estimated cost of retrofitting works.
In addition to this, our homes currently tout an average standard assessment procedure (SAP) rating higher than the social housing sector average and we’ve pledged for all new-builds to be constructed to net-zero standards.
Jonathan Higgs, chief executive at Raven Housing Trust, said: “True sustainability is all-encompassing and must take into account every aspect of our organisation’s impact on the planet. That includes our homes, how our residents live in them, our business operations and how our team’s work.
“Whilst understanding the importance and seriousness of the challenge facing us to achieve net-zero carbon we appreciate it is vital to take urgent action but have sought to do so through a thoughtful, measured and strategic approach.”
Housing Digital’s judges commented: “Very clear ideas which are supported by analysis. Understanding of where the biggest carbon impact is, which is useful in prioritising action.
“Raven has clearly been leading the way and helping to share learning with other landlords. Pledges were made early to make new build homes net zero, and they have a really good handle on their current position as well as costed plans to improve. Clear understanding of the challenges and actions in place to mitigate these.”
The near future will see Raven break ground on two new net-zero developments, as well as delve deeper into its retrofit programme by bidding for funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, which we hope will enable improvements on a further 150 homes. We’ll be sharing more details about these projects in Raven Times and across our social channels.