Our Green Agenda – helping customers to reduce their carbon footprint

We work hard to reduce the environmental impact of our communities and we have an Environmental Strategy that sets out clear and ambitious targets we want to achieve.

To support our strategy we are updating as many homes as we can to a set energy performance standard and are improving the physical fabric of our homes by installing insulation, replacing doors and windows and upgrading heating systems.

The improvements we are making are not only supporting the environment and helping to reduce carbon emissions but also helping customers to reduce their energy consumption, which is helping to reduce their bills and save them money.

Despite the Coronavirus pandemic, over the last year we've been able to access 170 lofts to install new or top-up loft insulation. This will see a saving of over 20 tonnes of Co2.

One customer to benefit from our energy improvements is Carol Valentine. In Carol’s own words she used to have to wear extra layers or a thick dressing gown to keep her warm, in what she described as a ‘really cold’ home.

Her two-bedroom terraced house, which she shares with her son, was one of 28 homes on the Stretford Road estate in Manchester renovated in a pilot we ran in partnership with Knauf Insulation. On paper, the targets of energy efficiency for these homes were being met but in reality, we were receiving customer enquiries advising they were struggling to heat their homes.

The pilot aimed to show the actual improvement in energy performance resulting from the retrofit, by installing monitoring devices in properties.

Suspecting that the cavity wall insulation installed by another company at the time of construction was failing, we worked with Knauf Insulation to identify issues. They found problems with loft insulation, which had sometimes been removed to install cabling and was not put back properly.

Wanting to test its new technology for measuring return on investment on refurbishment, Knauf Insulation paid more than £200,000 for new cavity wall, party wall and loft insulation for 28 homes on the estate, as well as pre and post-work monitoring.

We invested more than £30,000 in remedial work ahead of the refurbishment, including the removal of existing cavity wall insulation and rubble found around the door and window frames, repointing and repairs to guttering.

Knauf Insulation installed sensor devices, which measure how well a building’s walls, roof, windows and doors retain heat in the 28 homes, to measure the effectiveness of the work.

The results showed that the energy efficiency of the homes, which had electric heating installed, improved by 31% on average, reducing annual heating bills by a projected £411.