COMMUNITY ANCHORS: Supporting the UK Clean Growth Strategy with homes on Castle Vale

Words by Simon Wilson, Chief Executive Officer – The Pioneer Group & Compass Support

Simon Wilson – CEO The Pioneer Group / Supplied by The Pioneer Group

This year we’re working to deliver some important projects here on the Vale. They will support us to continue to deliver on our original promise to provide high-quality affordable housing and making lives and communities better.

As many of you will already be aware, we’re in the middle of a programme of work to replace windows and doors in many of our homes. These upgrades will make our homes warmer and more energy efficient for our residents but they’re also part of a much larger project.

Through the UK Clean Growth Strategy, the government has set a target for all social housing providers to get a minimum rating of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C for rented properties by 2035.

An EPC generally measures how energy efficient your home is, and this is an important to step to making all homes ‘net zero carbon’ by 2050.

We have also got funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) to continue this work.

We have now adopted the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing which is a framework to help us measure our success in this area.

To find out more about our work to make our homes more sustainable you can read our first Environmental and Social Governance report on our website.

One final note to say that it’s really important that we have up to date contact details for residents, if yours have changed, please let us know!

For more on The Pioneer Group visit www.pioneergroup.org.uk and for more on Compass Support visit www.compass-support.org.uk

 The Pioneer Group and Compass Support are key partners in the Erdington Local COMMUNITY ANCHORS programme – supporting independent local and community journalism.