Effective energy management is vital for decarbonisation: how are landlords going about this?

Data, funding and risk

Mr Hilditch asks the table how landlords are measuring consumption and whether this data is sufficient to make decisions to reduce usage as part of their net zero carbon goals.

Miles Lewis has been evaluating just that in his role as director of sustainability at Clarion Housing Group, to help him understand where the association is in terms of Scope 3 emissions – what the landlord is indirectly responsible for in its chain and residents’ energy usage.

He says: “We’re looking at supply parity and performance of homes because we’ve got 3,000 homes to build each year… Even though the data might not be perfect, you have to go on a journey where the start point is logical and what you’ve done is robust to put together a transition plan. I’m hoping that later in the year, we’ll be able to share this with the sector and show the method we’ve used to benchmark it and where we can improve.”

Paul Neale is sustainability manager at Soha Housing, which has 7,500 properties in Oxfordshire. As most homes are new, Soha has only 650 homes that are below Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) Band C.
He agrees with Mr Lewis: “It’s critical to get a carbon baseline to understand the cost. Finance is critical – if we don’t have the money, then it’s not going to happen.”

“While on paper I agree fabric-first is the approach that works best, it breaks the bank – and that’s a challenge for us,” says Steve Ellard, director of assets and sustainability at Yorkshire Housing, which has 20,000 properties across the county and 5,000 properties that require an upgrade to EPC Band C to meet the government’s 2030 target for social housing in England. “We had a conversation recently with our treasury advisors, who said from a stress-testing perspective, we’re now living in a time of what we would have called a ‘black swan’ a few years ago – it’s the reality now.”

Reducing consumption may not cut bills in a time of rising energy costs, Mr Ellard continues. “We recently received funding from the European Regional Development Fund for a retrofit scheme in Craven that had two specific aims: to reduce carbon emissions and to reduce residents’ energy bills. [When the retrofit was completed] we delivered way in excess on the carbon emission figures. However, because it happened at a time when energy costs were going through the roof, we weren’t able to reduce customers’ bills.”

Transparency

It is important to have transparency about the source of the data to have confidence in the analysis. Irina Mot, head of decarbonisation at Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing, says: “Our KPIs have dropped dramatically and we have had to explain where the data comes from, how we are using it and the challenges of it. This is the tyranny of data perfection, but data is not perfect. Sometimes how you look at the data is more important than the data.”

She suggests that creative ways and a different perspective can identify decarbonisation priorities.

Dan Pardesi, head of social housing at Inenco, says in the housing sector, the issue of gaining data to inform strategy can be complicated. Often because of large property portfolios, some landlords do not have up-to-date information on energy meter locations.

“Roll-out of automatic meter reading (AMR)/smart meters is increasingly important, as this will provide data that can be used to accurately report carbon emissions, focus investments and drive reductions in usage. With energy suppliers now fined for failure to roll out AMR, and those costs likely to be passed on, those landlords who support the roll-out quickly will also see financial benefit on their energy bills.”

For Lucy Breeze, sustainability manager at Golding Homes, an association that manages 8,500 homes across Kent, it is about joining up an organisation’s programmes to make a whole-house approach, rather than individual department goals, so that retrofit can work. “We’ve got huge support from our board and executive team. However, there is a gap between what our ambition is, our capacity and results. It’s not a rate of work that is sustainable because as a small organisation, there’s a lack of resource and we need to bring in the skills and labour,” she says.

“Resource is not just about capacity, it’s also about skills. I’m passionate about all colleagues having a
level of understanding. [We shouldn’t see it as] a sustainability problem. It is not a problem – it’s the way forward – and an opportunity that applies to everyone,” says Tessa Barraclough, head of sustainability at Riverside Group.