All-in on sustainability: SNG

For the first entry in a new series exploring how social landlords across the UK are taking a holistic approach to sustainability, Jim Dyer shares insight into SNG’s unrelenting commitment to creating a greener future for all. 

Why is sustainability important to your organisation?

At SNG we are a long-term business, committed to place, quality and our customers. Our vision of ‘thriving communities, over generations’ signals our wider commitments, beyond our landlord responsibilities and this long-term view.

Whilst by one measure SNG is only just over a year old (Sovereign Housing Association and Network Homes merged in 2023), we also just celebrated our 50th birthday, marking the time since Brent People’s Housing Association purchased its first home in 1974.

If we are to be making a similar or greater contribution to tackling housing need in 2074, we need to be making an increasingly positive contribution to the planet and nature. In order make a positive impact over generations, we must take action to improve our environmental impact as soon as possible. 

Could you provide an overview of the ways in which SNG is striving to become more sustainable? 

At present, our homes create the vast majority of our carbon emissions – overall and of our scope 3 emissions [indirect greenhouse gas emissions that occur from activities a company is indirectly responsible for, such as residents’ energy use]. 

These emissions have the greatest impact on our customers, leaving them with more expensive heating bills in homes that are harder to heat and less healthy. Tackling this challenge will be the most expensive part of our environmental sustainability strategy in overall terms, and hardest to fund, as the benefit of reduced energy expenditure does not accrue to the landlord in the current model. 

Thankfully, our Homes and Place Standard has already done the heavy lifting in this area and sets out a funded roadmap to get all SNG homes to a very good standard by 2050.

Our board adopted SNG’s first sustainability strategy in September 2024, and we are now in the process of rolling that out. At the heart of that strategy is a vision to embed consideration of the planet and nature into everything we do. 

Although other areas of our operations that are not directly related to heating our homes have a smaller impact, we still have a lot of work to do there. We want to systematically take every opportunity to make a positive contribution to the planet.

Video: SNG's Homes and Place Journey

Could you explain a bit more about the Homes and Place Standard and how you are investing in both new and existing homes? 

The Homes and Place Standard is far more than a guide to retrofitting. Rather, it’s the basis on which we assess existing and future homes across a whole range of factors. For ease, we divide these into four key areas: customers, homes, places, and sustainable future. 

For our customers, we want to ensure homes encourage long-term health and wellbeing; are safe, secure and inclusive; and enable service providers to give an excellent customer experience. We want our customers to have pride in their homes. And we measure that.  

The homes themselves must be adaptable, cost-effective and fit for the future. That means being ready for future technological advances, so we are not having to revisit them again in 25 years’ time. 

We also know the experience of a home is utterly dependent on place, so we want to ensure our neighbourhoods have character to ensure those who live there and work there can delight in them. 

We are completing new house types that will be the most energy efficient social housing units in the country

It is critical that we do not impose the standard on our customers against their will. From the start, it was important to us that the standard was developed collaboratively with our customers. Our residents, superbly led by our Resident Board Partnership, took a huge interest in the standard, offering their views at every stage of its development. 

At the same time, we are completing new house types that will be the most energy efficient social housing units in the country. At a new scheme near Exeter, we have partnered with Octopus Energy, so that our customers are guaranteed no utility bills for five years. Other schemes will offer customers very low bills, which is vitally important in a cost of living crisis but also critical to achieving net zero.

How are you making use of government decarbonisation and energy-efficiency initiatives?

This year, as we use government funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (now the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund) to pilot retrofit schemes, our customers are among the first to see the real benefits of investment in their homes, reducing their energy bills and helping reduce their environmental impact. Across our business, £19.2 million of grant funding will help us to retrofit over 3,000 homes; though the new government must expand and build on that commitment.

We are also preparing an ambitious bid to the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund Wave 3 and hope to hear positive news confirming our ambitions in 2025. 

How have you sought to ensure staff are bought in to your sustainability ambitions? 

We recognise we need to build on the strengths that already exist in our organisation. One such strength is a colleague-led network of individuals, who are passionate about improving SNG’s impact on the planet and nature, called the Green Group. They were formed prior to the merger that created SNG and have played a key cultural role in bringing the organisation together. 

The other key element is in taking sustainability to where our colleagues work, talking to them about the small differences they can make in their daily working lives, as well as the wider opportunities that exist. We want to make this real for our colleagues; the scale of the challenges are such that we want everyone to play a part. 

How do you measure the impact of your work in this area? 

SNG is an early adopter of the Sustainability Standard for Social Housing (SRS), and our measurement against each of the 46 criteria is set out in our Impact and Sustainability report 2024. 

The adopted environmental sustainability strategy has set a clear direction for SNG, but detailed targets, plans and actions have not yet been identified for all areas. These will be a priority over the next six to nine months. 

As we have not yet determined appropriate levels of targets, this will be a key part of implementing the strategy. It will be important that the targets are stretching but achievable on the basis of planned activity. Individual business areas will own the activities and targets, with the environmental sustainability strategy team providing support and challenge to ensure all opportunities are taken to embed consideration of the planet and nature. 

What challenges do you anticipate over the coming months and years? 

There is a big challenge with contested politics around climate change and associated messaging. SNG doesn’t do party politics, but we do have a role to play in telling a compelling and clear story about the importance of our work. 

Whilst much of the public debate focuses on the technical language of ‘net zero’, it is important that we make our environmental impact clear to customers and colleagues in ways which make the advantages of taking action real and apparent. To make a positive impact over generations, we must look to make a positive contribution to the planet, by which I mean become carbon negative. It will not be enough to just be neutral. 

The climate emergency will impact our customers hard. The impact of climate change has been shown to have a disproportionate impact on poorer households and BAME households, many of whom live in our homes. Older people and those with disabilities are also more likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of extreme climate impacts. 

Poverty, deprivation and health inequalities reduce people’s ability to prepare for, respond and recover from overheating and flooding incidents. We need to make sure that, as their housing provider, we are prepared. 

What are your priorities for the future? 

I just launched the strategy on a call with over a thousand colleagues, and I’m looking forward to more in-depth conversations with people from right across the organisation to bring to life what positive impacts they can and do have on the planet and nature. 

I’m going to be joining team meetings with every part of the organisation, joined by local members of the green group to add their passion, drive and connection.

Main image: Shutterstock AI; top-right image courtesy of SNG