By Jon Daley, Asset Sustainability and Data Manager, Magenta Living

Speaking in front of the 2019 UN Climate Summit, climate activist Greta Thunberg said: ‘Change is coming whether you like it or not.’

Whilst she was speaking specifically about rising global temperatures, I questioned over 100 delegates at the CIH’s Housing21 conference in Manchester about whether our sector is in the same boat.

We’re at a crucial time: government targets to be hit by 2030, 2035, and 2050; the need for over £100bn in funding within our sector to hit the 2050 standard; new standards in the form of PAS2035; the list is endless (and we haven’t even got to our most important asset of all yet – our residents!).

Climate change, to me, is both extremely complex and also Occam’s Razor simplistic. We need to prioritise making our homes better for the future and ensure we provide sustainable, vibrant surroundings for our residents to flourish in.

I do, however, have a sneaky suspicion you’re thinking, ‘but, Jon, where do we start?’ – and, yes, you’re right to think this. It’s a 30-year process, with some areas of the UK committing to earlier than 2050.

Working for a housing association that’s achieved SHIFT Silver Accreditation, and that was named one of the top 20 sustainable housing providers in the UK this year, here are my four key ingredients to get you going and to whet your appetite for the green agenda.

Decarbonisation culture

As the Magic of Thinking Big author, David Schwartz, said, ‘when you believe something can be done, your mind will find ways to do it… believing the solution paves way to the solution’.

It’s all well and good creating a strategy and doing your best to convince your board of action – but do you as a leader truly believe in sustainability as the solution?

Magenta Living believes in this so much that we’ve normalised the green agenda across the organisation to the point we have a decarbonisation culture. I work on sustainability within a team of nine colleagues and we’re fully supported by both our board and executive leadership team.

We understand that climate change is at least a 30-year project and have invested in this to produce results.

Similarly, I’d question you, the reader, to really think about what percentage of people across your organisation are interested in climate change.

From experience, the real answer would be double what you’ve just thought. Magenta Living has just over 600 colleagues and it’s hard for just nine people to have conversations and work amongst teams towards sustainability.

Therefore, we asked for volunteers of one member from each team, regardless of title, to become Climate Change Champion: 25 colleagues, inclusive of residents and committees, who are as passionate as me, to not just discuss ‘the climate’ but also see real business opportunities via real issues in real teams, and work together to solve these.

As an example of this, we worked together with the neighbourhood housing management team to standardise sustainability conversations and reduce the effects of fuel poverty as part of new resident visits.

In the last year alone, that’s created over 1,000 conversations with residents about energy usage and consumption, which has also justified Magenta Living introducting a new energy advice service. Not only are we helping our residents, but our operational areas have some of the highest fuel poverty in the country – in some locations, one in four of our residents are affected.

We realise that our leadership team and colleagues are passionate about sustainability, to the point we understand that this has to be central to all we do.

We have invested in our board and executive leadership team, obtaining carbon literacy training; invested in our own PAS2035 retrofit delivery team; and even upskilled our surveying workforce (DEA, retrofit assessor, and thermal drone piloting). We believe in the solution towards providing sustainable, vibrant homes, lives, and neighbourhoods.

Data

It’s both a standard opportunity and challenge that we have to be evidential in making decisions; however, I’d question you, the reader: what’s your data like? If I had to ask you, how do you measure your sustainability progress, could you answer me comfortably?

Similarly, if I asked you what 2050 looked like in terms of your housing stock, and what standard you need to get there, could you answer confidently? It’s ok if you don’t know – but data is essential to this.

Being a bit of a data geek (I’ve data in my job title and a Masters degree in data after all), within our first 12 months, we had to understand what our performance was.

One of the biggest steps we took was to spend time researching not only data standards (i.e., SECR reporting and associated elements such as environmental, social and governance reporting), but exactly what areas we needed to measure and for what reasons, both strategically and operationally.

We worked with SHIFT to understand standards and areas of importance and established a 12-point sustainability KPI framework. This was inclusive of four thematic areas: offices/operations; existing homes (both carbon and energy); new homes (same thing); and ecology.

Our rationale was that we had to consider standard reporting procedures with Scope emissions (inclusive of stock). We wanted to understand more about fuel poverty elements and, of course, we wanted to track progress on our carbon offsetting and biodiversity elements.

Each of these also has a rationalised target and auditable data to ensure fairness, accountability, and further investigation if needed.

These are not only reported to senior management each month, they’re also shared with our board and the executive leadership team every quarter, to show progress and provide thought between us on how best to move forward. This example shows, as an organisation, how we’re constantly adapting to the opportunity of climate change and sustainability for the benefit of our residents.

Partnership working

Most sustainable housing professionals know that, now more than ever, partnership working is needed. So much so that it’s central to all funding bids and, as stated by BEIS Secretary of State, Kwasi Kwarteng, himself.

Whilst I’m proud of Magenta Living’s culture and what we’ve achieved across the organisation, I was asked a lot about how we can help others. As a leader, I’ve always felt it of the upmost importance to empower others and inspire leadership, as opposed to just making strides in progress – after all, we’re all in this together.

Ask yourself, honestly: when working with partners, do you truly know their internal challenges and advantages when coming towards a group work setting?

For too long, we’ve worked as associates and not as true partners, as we’ve been concerned about our own housing stock, when in fact we need to look at projects from a place-making approach.

At Magenta Living, we understand that all funding bids require teamwork. We’ve learned that one of the biggest lessons from the Social Housing Decarbonization Fund (SHDF) was that there wasn’t enough mapping of these amongst partners.

As best practice, our current SHDF bid has been written in light of partners and with partner feedback. Not only do we intend to work in an area that has over one in four people living in fuel poverty on standardised archetypes, utilising a PAS2035 retrofit team with fabric first measures, we worked with the local authority to write this in line with its local plans and climate strategy, and took into account their strategic intentions for the borough.

Similarly, Magenta Living have done the same with the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, in that we scoped the LCR housing and investment strategies.

We also spoke to potential partners prior to scoping measure usage on archetypes, as well as potential geographies to ensure homogeneity in bidding. Treat partners as true partners and not as associates to create a true win-win situation for our residents and organisations alike.

Residents

Our most important assets are our residents. 4.1m households call our assets home across the country and it’s our duty to work with residents for the greater good.

We must realise that retrofitting properties can be, in some instances, an almost lifestyle change. Not everyone will grasp new technologies such as air source heat pumps, smart meters, and PV energy easily, as well as the messages around this change and what it means for the climate.

Similarly, we understand that within the country we have an average of one in 10 people living in fuel poverty, whilst locally it’s around one in eight, and in some areas its over one in four. We must ensure that whilst we’re looking to increase the sustainability of our properties as assets, we also need to do the same for our residents.

Though we’ve undertaken consultation with our Climate Change Champions and established information via our social media channels and websites, we’ve also worked hard to look at both our passive and active engagement with our residents.

Passively, Magenta Living is currently creating a new, interactive resident engagement platform, MAGENTA CONNECT. This will empower residents to share their views around key topics such as sustainability.

Whether its queries around attitudes, delivery experiences, or the science, we aim to provide opportunities for our residents to really get involved and help shape how we support our residents and allow them to contribute ideas to projects such as our climate change framework.

Actively, we’ve changed some resident-facing processes to accommodate for more sustainability conversations; however, Magenta Living will soon be launching an in-person energy advice service. This will provide support to residents on behavioural sustainability issues.

Not only will this aid residents, we’ll also be able to further drill down data for other elements such as funding bids and have an ability to map fuel poverty data just for Magenta Living households, alongside official data sources (i.e., ONS).

In summary, these four ingredients have really enabled us to make a significant change within our working environments and communities, and I hope you can use them to build something incredible and add towards our vision of providing sustainable, vibrant homes, lives, and neighbourhoods.