Environmental, social and governance

For many, this last year has been one of adjusting to today’s living costs, despite wider economic pressures on our business somewhat easing. The task of addressing our long-standing housing crisis remains one of the country’s most deep-rooted and significant issues.

As for the environment, we’ve seen net zero and climate change move into a wider, more polarising public debate. Alongside this, we experienced a long, wet winter preceded by the warmest summer on record: a clear indication of the world’s changing climate. More recent global crises have brought energy costs back into sharp national focus, underlining how events elsewhere can quickly have an impact here at home.

This has sharpened our efforts to keep our long-term responsibilities in clear, short-term focus. Through this, we’ve covered more ground this year and made progress across the board. From better using customer feedback and insight to improve our services, to enhancing customers’ homes, through to strengthening our efforts to be an inclusive and responsible employer, it’s been a successful year.

Despite the ongoing challenges associated with delivering new homes, we’ve remained true to our vision by making another significant contribution to the region’s affordable housing supply. Meanwhile, as we’ve kept our long-term responsibilities in sight, we’ve continued to not let the scale of these challenges overwhelm us, instead recognising the role we must play and the progress we must make.

"Making continued progress against our long-term ESG goals has been a key focus this year. From supporting community initiatives and helping customers benefit from warmer homes, to helping more households have a home of their own through to seeing our staff progress into new roles, there are many positive outcomes to celebrate: for customers and communities, our staff and the environment."

- Mike Shepherd, Chief Investment Officer

Our Environmental, Social and Governance story in numbers 2025-26

Building on our firm commitment to transparency and accessibility across all aspects of our operations, we’re once again sharing our ESG reporting through this interactive, digital platform. We hope this provides you with a simple and straight-forward way to understand our ESG performance over the last 12 months.

As a leading housing association with a long-standing ESG strategy and a commitment to sector best practice, we’ve reported on our performance against the Sustainability Reporting Standard (SRS). We hope this helps with transparency and consistency when understanding how we’ve done and the progress we’ve made.

Our performance against our own ESG objectives and our SRS reporting can be found below. If you have any questions or thoughts on any aspects of our work, including how you’ve found accessing our ESG reporting via this platform, please get in touch.

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

Financial support for customers in hardship through our welfare fund

Our ESG performance

Environmental

We’ve completed delivery of year 1 of our energy and sustainability strategy (2025-30). It’s good to report that we’ve made further progress measuring our supply chain carbon emissions this year to give us a more complete picture of our scope 3 carbon emissions. And we’ve now finished our work measuring climate risk for our homes, including for overheating and flooding. Investment in delivering warm homes continues, despite some continuing delivery challenges; we’re pleased that significantly more customers are now living in warmer homes than they were a year ago.

Objective: Become a zero carbon business

Our aim to become a net zero carbon business by 2050 has progressed this year. Crucially, we’ve made steps in developing our methodology for measuring supply chain carbon emissions - this has provided us with more confidence for our long-term measurement of scope 3 carbon emissions. We’ve also further developed investment options to reduce carbon emissions from our offices, which we’re aiming to deliver in 2026-27.

Click here to see our carbon emissions data

Objective: Make our homes more energy efficient

We know one of the most impactful improvements we can deliver to our customers’ homes is to improve energy efficiency. In turn, this aids our work in further reducing our own carbon footprint. In the last 12 months, building on earlier work, we’ve completed warm home improvements to 295 properties. As a result, more than 88.7% homes have an EPC C rating or above, meaning we’re well placed to meet our EPC C target by 2030.

Objective: Be a sustainable business partner

As a major housing provider in our region, we’re working with partners across the housing and built environment sector to increase delivery of our sustainability programmes. This includes working with our local authority partners to develop approaches to warm homes delivery that benefit everyone in communities where VIVID operates. The government’s new Warm Homes Plan reinforces the importance of the approaches we’ve been developing, and local government reorganisation creates an opportunity for a more strategic, locally led model for large‑scale retrofit.

We’re a lead partner in a consortium of 7 housing associations developing new approaches to funding warm homes delivery. We’re working with the Retrofit Society on long‑term financial solutions that don’t rely on grant funding. We’re also sharing our delivery experience with the wider sector, particularly our work on customer engagement – one of the biggest barriers to successful retrofit programmes.

Alongside this work, we’ve continued to collaborate with sector partners on electric vehicle (EV) charging and biodiversity, including developing a scalable, cost‑effective EV charging solution that we expect will offer a strong delivery model for the wider sector.

Social

Objective: Offer homes people can afford

As we continue to see the challenges many people face in securing a home together with the costs of today’s housing crisis, we’ve centred our social impact work on offering more homes that are readily affordable. Through our development activity, we’ve enabled more than 1,500 more households to find a home of their own.

In particular, the delivery of 685 social rent homes and 353 homes for affordable rent highlights another strong performance. As in previous years and given the important choice they offer, we’ve also recognised the ongoing need for shared ownership homes in our region. Within our overall delivery of new homes, we’ve completed a further 391 shared ownership homes this year.

Objective: Targeting development activity in areas of need

We remain conscious of ensuring our investment in development activity delivers the most impact, so we’ve been working to address housing needs, particularly where we know they’re significant.

The breakdown of where we’ve delivered more new affordable homes across our operating area highlights how we’ve sought to respond to this objective over the last 12 months.

Objective: Help customers thrive in their homes and communities

We recognise our potential to deliver wider impact for individual customers and the communities we work in, over and above that created through the homes we provide. Here’s a taster of the many positive outcomes we’ve achieved this year:

Through our Community Investment Fund, we’re investing £100,000 through VIVID Plus to support local community projects across our neighbourhoods, helping bring new ideas to life and strengthen existing initiatives
At a time when many customers struggle to adjust to today’s living costs, coupled with a range of changes in the benefits system, our financial inclusion team has helped secure £13.75m of extra income for our customers
Having launched the Housing Perks app for our customers last year, we’ve continued to promote the savings opportunities available to our customers; 1,988 have signed up in the last year. Over the past 12 months customers spent £1,221,022, generating more than £27,833 in savings on everyday essentials

Governance

Objective: Be completely transparent and open about how we work

Transparency, internally and externally, remains fundamental to our operations. All details of our performance last year have continued to be published, including how we’ve performed against the Regulator of Social Housing’s Tenant Satisfaction Measures. You can check out the results in the h ow we’re performing section.

In line with our efforts to continually improve the services and experiences we provide to our customers, our service standards remain shaped by customer feedback, and you can read more about this work here. Our service standards are published on our website following each quarterly update, and all policies are also readily available to view.

Objective: Involve our customers so that we can deliver great homes and services for them

We’ve always been a customer-centric organisation - this year we’re particularly proud of the progress we’ve made in strengthening customer influence. Building on our Tpas accreditation that we secured last year and retained this year, we’ve made real strides in making customer involvement feel more established, consistent and meaningful.

From widening the range of customers involved to broadening our engagement methods, we’re pleased with how we’ve better met this objective in the last 12 months. It’s clear that, across our organisation, we’ve built a true customer first mindset. Read more about this work here.

Objectives: Foster a company culture that is inclusive and supportive for all; and building a high-performing organisation

At a time when the sector is being asked to step up against a backdrop of changing regulations and greater customer expectations, ensuring our people are performing at their very best, while continuing to grow and learn, has never been more critical. To help make this happen, we’ve continued to place real focus on our role as a responsible employer, with fairness, respect and support for our people being at the heart of our culture.

From listening to colleagues through an organisation-wide survey, to providing diverse routes for career growth through to fair pay, we’ve remained true to our goal to deliver an inclusive and supportive culture that drives high performance.

Our efforts this year are clearly highlighted in the 'our work is centred around our customers' page, which tells you more about how we’ve sought to meet this important objective.