Quality homes and places | Sustainability

We believe everyone is entitled to a good quality home that they can afford, in a place where they are proud to live, and we aim to ensure the homes we provide and the places we create are high quality, affordable, safe and sustainable.

Our objectives

Our Sustainability Strategy has four homes-focused objectives:

Provide high quality, affordable homes

Invest in the decarbonisation of our homes

Provide safe, healthy places to live

Create sustainable living environments

Providing high quality, affordable homes

Our New Build Residential Policy and Design Standards go far beyond the Decent Homes Standards ensuring we meet customer needs today and for the future, and focus on five key elements:

Accessibility - ensuring homes are accessible for the widest range of people
Space fit for purpose - Orbit Homes house types meet the Nationally Described Space Standards (NDSS) as a minimum and are designed to Royal Society of the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) Safer by Design Gold Standard.
Design - We offer parity of specification across all tenures where possible to achieve high quality, tenure blind developments.
Future proofing - our designs aim to allow for the installation of foreseeable technologies
Environment and sustainability - We aim to minimise the environmental impact of the homes we build, and the construction process undertaken.

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Investing in the decarbonisation of our homes

We continue to invest in the energy efficiency of our homes and have committed that 100% of our existing homes will be EPC band C or above by 2030. We continue to make good progress towards this target, with 85.6% of our homes now rated EPC C or above.

As a participator in the Government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund Demonstrator programme, we completed energy efficiency upgrades on 69 homes in Stratford-upon-Avon, and have subsequently completed a further 141 properties in the West Midlands under the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) Wave 1. We are also well underway with our SHDF Wave 2.1 project to upgrade an additional 212 properties, with a number of properties already completed.

We have also piloted the installation of solar panels at one of our Independent Living schemes, Caesar Court, resulting in the successful generation of over 1500 kwh of energy in the first three months since installation. The lessons learnt on this project will inform the development of a business model to support the rollout of this technology across our stock.

Providing safe, healthy places to live

Keeping our customers safe in their own homes is paramount to us. To ensure this we are adopting British and ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) standards, which have been used to create our unique standards-based Building Safety Strategy for in-scope buildings.

Creating sustainable living environments

We build partnerships with community organisations to support the creation of inclusive, healthy and sustainable communities where people are proud to live.

As part of this we work in partnership with statutory organisations and voluntary community sector partners and run a number of community hubs to provide services for our customers and the wider community through our Better Days programme. We currently operate community hubs in Newmarket, Stratford-upon-Avon and Gorleston, with a further hub under construction as part of the Orbit Homes Micklewell Park development.