Environmental, social and governance
We’re a long-term business responsible for managing and delivering homes for customers now and in the years to come. As a result, it’s vital we remain focused and have clarity around our impact on the environment, on our customers as well as on our own people, all of which is determined by how we’re governed.
We’ve continued to work in a period where many of our customers have felt challenged while we’ve all seen, particularly in the last 12 months, the issues caused by the impacts of climate change. At the same time, consequences of the country's severe lack of affordable housing over the long-term is now properly being understood, and seen societally and economically. The wider environment in which we've continued to operate, as a result, remains one defined by competing pressures and many challenges. As we're here for the long term, we've a responsibility to navigate these pressures and challenges, remaining sighted on our vision of delivering more homes, bright futures while making progress against our environmental, social and governance goals.
"In the last year, we’ve continued to create positive impact for customers and communities and have worked hard to further reduce our carbon footprint while supporting the natural world around us. Our activity has stretched from improving existing homes to be more energy efficient, creating new homes to address supply challenges, investing time and resources in our neighbourhoods through to the development of a new 5 year energy and sustainability strategy."
- Tom Robinson, Executive Director of Assets and Sustainability
Our ESG story in numbers 2024-25
As we make a step change in our energy and sustainability strategy, we’ve also made a change in our broader ESG reporting. Given the relevance of this area of our work to everyone, whether you’re a customer, investor, regulator or local authority partner, we’ve evolved our reporting through this interactive, online platform. We hope that by reporting on our performance this way, it gives a better, more rounded picture in a more readily accessible manner. But we'd value your feedback - if you've any thoughts, it would be great to hear them.
To help tell our own ESG performance story, we’ve adopted the Sustainability Reporting Standard (SRS) for Social Housing. By reporting against the criteria set out in the SRS, it helps our efforts to be understood in a transparent, consistent and comparable way to the rest of our sector. Additionally, our ESG focused work contributes to 9 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Further information on our performance against our leading ESG objectives, our SRS reporting and our Impact & Allocation Report can be found below.
new homes completed
invested in our existing homes
Retained
G1/V1 ratings from the Regulator of Social Housing
of the homes we completed were affordable tenures
of our customers' homes had energy efficiency improvements completed
gender pay gap achieved
new customers welcomed
ethnicity pay gap achieved
energy efficiency funding secured from the Warm Homes Fund
Our performance: Environmental
Objective: Make our homes more energy efficient
With a need to improve the energy efficiency of our existing homes, we've continued to deliver our first major retrofit project this last year. In supporting our efforts to deliver more warmer homes, we've secured further grant funding this year to accelerate our work, following our own significant investment. From our work in the last 12 months, we've now delivered improvements to 321 of our customers' homes while we're targeting another 1,800 next year. Over 88% of our homes have an energy efficiency rating of EPC C or above and we’re aiming to be at 100% by 2030.
Objective: Become a zero-carbon business
We know we need to work hard to become a zero carbon business. This year and for the first time, we've started to understand our supply chain's emissions. Alongside our work to improve the energy efficiency of our customers' homes, we've also made further steps across the organisation, such as with the growth in the number of electric and hybrid vans in our fleet, now standing at 29.
Objective: Be a sustainable business partner
We know it's vital that we help our customers to reduce their environmental impact as well as encourage partners and suppliers to do the same. Part of this is by taking direct, positive action ourselves and leading by example. In this case, we've continued to advocate for and develop our approach to place-based retrofit, working with our local council partners as a way of increasing opportunities to deliver more warm homes.
Objective: Share our work and learn from other
Sharing our experiences and knowledge while learning from others has been another key objective and, once again, we've made a positive contribution to sustainability discussions in the sector. We've also positively sought to enhance our own knowledge and practices by engaging with others outside of our own organisation. In looking back at the last year, our work here has notably seen us participate in and attend a wide range of conferences, panels and roundtables.
In the coming year and reflective of our new energy and sustainability strategy, which is focused on supporting our activity at greater scale, we're introducing a new set of environmental objectives. You can find out more about our latest strategy here.
Our performance: Social
Objective: Offer homes people can afford
Given the continuing high open market rental rates in our region, we have a leading social objective to do all we can to offer rented homes that are properly affordable to those on low to middle incomes. As a result of our significant development activity, we’ve delivered:
- 335 homes for social rent
- 526 homes for affordable rent
We've also responded to the high costs associated with home ownership and the challenges this creates for those squeezed between the open market and local housing waiting lists. Given this need, we’ve created valuable opportunities for people in this position to secure a home of their own by delivering 459 shared ownership homes in the last 12 months.
Overall, this means that 88% of our new homes this year were for social and affordable rent or shared ownership.
Objective: Targeting development activity in areas of need
Our development activity has continued to be determined by where we know housing is needed the most. Looking across our region, and with housing waiting lists remaining high, the breakdown of our activity by local authority paints a good picture of how we've responded to this particular objective - find out more.
Objective: Help customers thrive in their homes and communities
Creating bright futures for our customers is a core part of our vision, whether that's providing individual support or helping improve the physical and social environments in our neighbourhoods. In considering how we've performed against this objective in the last year, a look at just a few of our highlights demonstrates the positive impact and outcomes we've created:
- Our Money, Advice and Benefits team helped secure £14.3m of extra income for our customers
- Through our Place Shaping team, we supported the roll out of a community focused initiative aimed at reducing knife crime, which is now expanding as a result
- We provided nearly £380,000 additional financial support through our welfare fund to help those customers in real hardship
Our performance: Governance
Objective: Be completely transparent and open about how we work
Over the past few years, our sector has faced significant scrutiny and regulatory changes, including the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023. Since April 2023, housing associations must collect customer satisfaction data, and our performance is now evaluated through Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs). We achieved 73% overall satisfaction for low-cost rented customers and 54% for low-cost home ownership customers. Detailed results are available in the How we're performing page here.
Our service standards, developed with customer input, help measure our performance and are updated quarterly on our website. We maintain transparency in our operations, including a clear approach to complaints, with performance details available on our website. We also publish all organisational policies online to ensure accessibility. We continuously collaborate with customers to ensure our policies are clear and effective.
Objective: Involve our customers so that we can deliver great homes and services for them
A crucial governance objective and one which now sits at the very centre of our work is around the role of our customers in shaping the services we provide. From our steps towards transforming our customer experience as well as the embedding of our new customer influence strategy, it's clear we've made positive and significant progress, highlighted by our Tpas accreditation. More information is available here.
Objectives: Foster a company culture that is inclusive and supportive for all; and building a high-performing organisation
To make sure we can meet the varying and changing needs of our customers, we need to maintain and develop a culture where everyone feels they belong, which champions diversity and which supports individuals to grow, irrespective of who who they are. From the positive action of our staff forums and the contributions they've made across the organisation through to our commitment to being an equitable and inclusive business, we've performed well again this year.
This work is critical if we're to deliver an excellent customer experience and service. Our progress over the last year is highlighted in our Culture and ways of working section here.
Keynote supporting statistics to note:
- Median gender pay gap - this now stands at -1% which means that for every £1 earned by men, women earned 1p more. This is a huge achievement, of which we’re incredibly proud
- Median ethnicity pay gap - this has been reduced to 0% down from 4.3% in 2023
Sustainability Reporting Standard (SRS)
Environmental
Social
Governance
Impact and Allocation Report
We published our sustainable financing framework (SFF) in November 2022 in conjunction with our EMTN programme. This framework aligns with the principles and guidelines (the ‘Principles’) published by the International Capital Markets Association (ICMA) and Loan Market Association (LMA) allowing us to issue sustainable finance debt instruments. We’re required to report on their impact and allocation, so this report shows how much finance we’ve allocated to eligible projects and the impact of that finance.
As we haven’t issued sustainable debt instruments yet, we’re not obliged to issue an Impact and Allocation Report. However, we’ve chosen to create the report to show investors that we have over £1.3bn of eligible spend to refinance. At VIVID, ESG is core to our purpose and our vision of ‘More Homes, Bright Futures’. By refinancing this spend we’ll be able to meet the need for more affordable homes and deliver a full range of support services. It will also fund our ambitious environmental objectives of making our existing and future new homes more energy efficient and becoming a zero-carbon business.
We are fully committed to robust governance. We have G1 and V1 ratings, the highest governance and viability ratings from the Regulator for Social Housing. Producing this report puts in place governance processes for regular reporting to the market. We also pride ourselves on our transparency, and wanted to be clear about the progress we’re making on ESG related projects; we felt the publication of an Impact and Allocation Report complemented the Sustainable Reporting Standard (SRS) reporting that forms part of our ESG approach.
Our framework sets out 4 core components of the principles: use of proceeds, process for project evaluation and selection, management of proceeds, and reporting. This report details how we adhere to these principles:
1. Use of proceeds
2. Allocation of funds
3. Impact of funds
4. External review
