Social Housing Tenants’ Climate Jury Completes – Recommendations to the Sector Launches at Northern Housing Summit

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With the Social Housing Tenants’ Climate Jury recently completing, eyes now look ahead to the Northern Housing Summit where the Jury’s recommendations to the Sector will be launched.

The Jury brought together 30 social housing tenants from NHC members First Choice Homes Oldham, Karbon Homes, Salix Homes, Thirteen Group, and Yorkshire Housing to question experts and work together to give their views as to how tenants, social housing landlords, and others could work together to tackle climate change in our homes and neighbourhoods.

The process was designed to bring tenants into the heart of the discussion on preparing homes for net zero. In turn, gaining a greater understanding of

The final group of tenants was the result of a random invitation process, with 7500 invitations being sent to households from involved landlords tenant base with an invitation to be involved. From the 162 applications to take part, sampling was used to establish a group that reflected what we know about the demographics of social housing tenants in the North of England.

Over ten weeks, and 30 hours of deliberation, the Jury heard from and discussed climate change with invited experts coming from organisations like The Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, National Energy Action, and representatives from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The Jury were also able to question Lord Callanan, Minister for Business, Energy and Corporate Responsibility, as part of the process.

At the end of the ten week Jury, 19 recommendations were finalised under four key themes:

  • Retrofit Technology
  • Costs and Managing Disruption to Tenants
  • Education, Raising Awareness, Communications and Housing Association Collaboration
  • Tackling Climate Change in Our Neighbourhoods

The detailed recommendations contain a number of practical suggestions to the sector as well as longer term ambitions to ensure social housing leads on tackling climate change through good quality retrofit programmes and creating greener healthier neighbourhoods. They underline the sense of urgency felt by the group, an emphasis on ensuring high standards, a need to develop considered retrofit strategies over the medium-longer term, suggestions as to how communication can be made more honest and transparent, how the sector can be upfront on costs both now and in the future, the value placed on collaboration and pooling risk and reward across the region, and finally how the sector as a whole, both tenants landlord officers, can improve its knowledge on both renewable heating technology and climate change more broadly.

The Northern Housing Summit will this year host the official launch of the Social Housing Tenants’ Climate Jury and offers a first look in detail on the Jury project. Attendees will be joined by a number of people involved in the project; Nick Atkin, Chief Executive, Yorkshire Housing, and Donna Cezair, Chief Executive, First Choice Homes Oldham, who will both discuss why they decided to support the work and how they will work with the Jury’s Recommendations; as well as Jenny Osbourne, Chief Executive, TPAS, and Rashida Owoseni, a Customer Committee Member at Salix Homes, who both formed part of the Jury’s Oversight Panel.

For further information and to confirm your attendance at the Northern Housing Summit, follow this link:

https://www.mynhc.org.uk/event/general?id=Northern_Housing_Summit_2021190140910

The Social Housing Tenants’ Climate Jury’s dedicated webpage, including further information on the Jury process as well as recordings of the presentations by the Jury’s invited commentators, follow this link:

https://www.northern-consortium.org.uk/the-social-housing-tenants-climate-jury/