In a first for the UK economy, the Social Housing sector welcomed the Sustainability Reporting Standard (SRS) in November 2020 to increase investment in the sector. Although a large number of ESG reporting standards have already been established, SRS has been specifically tailored for Social Housing providers.
Consisting of 30 core metrics and 18 enhanced metrics, spread across 12 themes that range from Staff Wellbeing, Climate Change, to Building Safety, the SRS aims to address the inconsistency of ESG reporting between organisations within the same sector. A common issue observed in other areas of the economy.
By providing a voluntary standardised reporting framework, financial lenders and investors in social housing are provided with relevant, transparent, and comparable ESG performance across the sector. It is hoped that this will enable Housing Associations to attract greater funding needed to tackle the UK’s housing crisis, improve building safety, and decarbonise existing homes to meet net zero targets.
The Sustainable Reporting Standard was first developed as a collaboration between a working group of housing associations led by Peabody, financial advisory firms, and The Good Economy in 2019. Since then, 66 housing providers have adopted the standard with this number only expected to grow in the coming years.
As a leading provider of digital board governance solutions for UK housing, we've been able to hear first-hand the many challenges they have been facing in delivering meaningful ESG disclosures.
We have been hard at work developing our own reporting tool and are proud to introduce Convene ESG. Our aim is to alleviate some of the challenges of data gathering, performance tracking, and reporting, helping the housing sustainability, finance and governance teams focus on their transition pathway towards net zero.
We are working in close collaboration with a number of existing Convene housing customers including Orbit and Cartrefi Conwy as part of our early adopters programme. Through their valuable feedback, we will together continue to develop and fine-tune our platform, delivering a robust end-to-end ESG experience.
Please get in touch if you would like to know more about our early adopters programme, we have some spaces available and also welcome inquiries from other sectors (TCFD, we have our eye on you).
