Improving the sustainability of our housing stock (Southend-on-Sea City Council)

Housing Advisers Programme case study

2021/22 cohort 

Southend-on-Sea City Council has set a target to become a carbon neutral organisation by 2030. Our housing stock, of over 6,000 homes, accounts for nearly 40 per cent of our carbon footprint, which means that decarbonising this sector is crucial for meeting our target.

This project aimed to set some of the foundations for tackling this challenge by setting the baselines for the retrofit challenge and ensuring that our new build homes are sustainable. By obtaining the intelligent Parity Projects data system, we are now able to model what each retrofit scenario will cost and see its associated savings. This will allow us to set robust but realistic targets and to measure our progress in an empirical manner. Also by enhancing the standards of our new builds, we are also ensuring that we are not adding to our retrofit challenge.

This baseline data has informed the creation of the Council’s first Retrofit Action Plan and has demonstrated to us where we will need to improve our data. Our new build specification is currently being used to develop a Passivhaus pilot project, however it will be vital to ensure that we appoint experienced Passivhaus contractors to deliver the specification. The two strands of work are already having a significant impact in improving the sustainability of our housing stock, but in both cases continued buy-in to the resources will be needed if they are to continue to succeed.

The Council owns over 6,000 homes which currently make up 40 per cent of the organisation’s carbon footprint. In order to reach our goal of being a net zero carbon organisation by 2030 we will need to undertake a significant programme of energy efficiency retrofit.

In order to start on this journey we needed to improve our data so that we fully understood our starting position and could begin to model the best interventions to take. Our current data was patchy and not geared towards retrofit, so this project would help us pull together our different strands of data into one dedicated retrofit space. We also need to make sure that anything new that we build does not add to the retrofit challenge.

We had already identified the Passivhaus standard as the way to reduce the carbon footprint of our new builds, however we lacked internal expertise to be able to specify this in detail. We also needed to be able to take a holistic view of our current standards which did not account for other areas of sustainability, such as embodied carbon.

We used Parity Project’s Portfolio product to create an interactive modelling database that pulled together what data we currently had into one space. Several workshop sessions were held with key housing and data officers to ensure that Parity had all the relevant data, this took slightly longer than anticipated due to internal capacity issues.

Nonetheless, once all the data was collated, Parity then built the system over six weeks. This software now allows us to model different targets and evaluate the associated costs and savings. This tool has already fed into the creation of a Retrofit Action Plan and will allow the organisation to set more specific targets and create business cases for investment. The software also highlights where our data sets can be improved to give a more accurate picture.

We also worked with Parity to produce a report that summarised the key data with a view to getting this refreshed in 12 months once we have removed anomalies and provided some updates.

We also engaged Bell Philips architect and Beyond Carbon Associates to uplift our current new build Employer Requirements (ERs) to a Passivhaus standard. By using experts, we have ensured that we will build high performing Passivhaus homes on future developments. The process of uplifting the ER’s was a collaborative discussion over four sessions, which also allowed us to upskill internal staff on some of the specifics of Passivhaus. By including embodied carbon into the specification, we were also able to ensure that we are taking a holistic approach to sustainability.

The data software has helped us to inform the development of our Retrofit Action Plan, and in the near future will help us to set more specific targets for our programme of works. The exercise helped to highlight where our data needs improvement, and this is already underway with more Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) being completed. The modeling data is also helping us to calculate the likely cost of reaching net zero, which will help us to articulate the challenge to senior leaders.

The Passivhaus ERs are already being used on a Passivhaus pilot project, whereby we will be developing three homes using the Passivhaus Planning Package. We aim for these to be complete in 2025 and will then use this learning to inform our future council housebuilding projects.

We will now continue to improve our data to ensure that our Parity Portfolio system is as accurate as possible. This will allow us to use the data to apply for retrofit funding and ensure that we are focusing our retrofit programme on the areas that need it most.

The Passivhaus ERs will continue to be updated as we learn more about the standard, particularly after we have completed the Retrofit Pilots. We will also share the knowledge that we have learned from both of these pieces of work with our colleagues across Essex, and have already engaged with the South Essex Housing Group and Essex Developers Group to share the initial results.

These projects showed us the importance of building contingency time into our timelines. Despite the main aspects of the projects only taking around two months each, the lead in time and need to save allocated time for sharing the products meant that we only just finished with the 12 months. This was due to factors such as difficulty in getting hold of data, ensuring that procurement procedures were agreed, and giving enough time to fully digest the final products ready to share with our partners.

The project has also taught us that senior level buy-in is vital for the project’s long-term success. The products are very valuable in their own right, but it is important that we continue to keep them up to date and improve on them.

Ben Harrison, Sustainable Housing officer, Southend-on-Sea City Council: [email protected]