Our aim to ensure all our residents feel warm, safe and comfortable in their homes has received a boost this week following a successful bid for government funding.
The £8 million Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund grant from the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero means that more than 1,000 households living in our social homes will ultimately benefit from reduced energy use and associated lower bills.
The grant will be used to upgrade several different types of home in our social housing stock to ensure they achieve an energy performance certificate (EPC) at band C by 2025. Improvements will focus mainly on better insulation and ventilation, which will also support our drive to reduce the risk of damp and mould, which we know is important to residents.
Crucially, the people living in the homes identified for improvement using the grant won’t be the only ones to benefit. We deliberately designed our bid to create a template for best practice and learning, which means we can scale up the delivery of improvement packages to ensure all our rented homes are at EPC band C by 2030.
Beyond improving individual residents’ living standards, we are also committed to playing our part in tackling climate change. Our sustainability strategy, published in autumn 2022, sets a target of all our homes being net zero by 2050, and this grant represents a crucial step along the way to meeting that aim.
The grant will fund improvements to our estates and blocks with a high proportion of poorly performing homes – those at EPC band D or below. Those homes will include a mix of property types from Victorian street properties through 1930s converted flats to electrically heated houses built in the early 1990s to ensure we get as much learning as possible to inform future programmes.
Homes in the programme are spread across London, with the largest projects set to take place in the boroughs of Brent, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Ealing.
In line with the requirements of the bidding process, we will provide £12,430,875 to complement the SHDF grant of £8,097,538 to improve 1,002 homes.