A national influencer

There are difficult and complex environmental challenges that face us all in accelerating the decarbonisation of UK homes, but to date there has been little consideration of what the impact is for customers.

Many of the changes required will involve substantial costs, with home buyers, owners, landlords and the Government facing the cost of higher new home standards and of retrofitting, whilst customers face the potential for increased costs to heat their homes. There is a real challenge ahead to meet these competing demands.

Working alongside the Chartered Institute of Housing, we gathered the views of 900 customers to help us understand our social rented households’ priorities around the net zero carbon agenda, as well as to examine what matters to them in relation to their environment.

This study, which is one of the first in-depth pieces of work of its kind, underlines that working collaboratively and engaging our customers throughout the course of this process is fundamental to the net zero carbon transformation. The findings and recommendations made offer invaluable insight into how the sector can work towards decarbonisation plans whilst ensuring customers are at the forefront of the decision-making process. 

Orbit provides free and confidential debt advice available to every customer. We are the first housing association to partner with PayPlan to provide a telephone and online service. We know the engagement rate is high, as is customer satisfaction. But how do know it is worth the investment in terms of outcomes?

We have carried out a randomised controlled trial (RCT) on the service, as well as measuring the customer and business outcomes. The results demonstrate that debt advice does pay and our finding are invaluable reading for the sector.

Read our Debt Advice Does Pay Report

In 2018 we launched our Happy, Healthy Starts campaign in conjunction with Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) to identify practical ways for landlords to help tackle poverty for young people.

We provide homes to over 16,000 people under the age of 16, of which an estimated 4,000 are growing up in a low income household.

Through working with children and parents living in our homes, we identified a number of simple practical changes housing providers can make to improve the lives of young people. We also worked with government to advise them on improvements that they could make to the administration of Universal Credit and reduce hardship for many, thousands of families.