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 have made further progress towards this target with over 87% of our homes now rated EPC C or above.

This year, our Wave 2.1 project targeted energy efficiency improvements to 212 EPC D and below properties. A strong track record of delivery resulted in the award of an additional £580,000 of funding from the consortia lead, West Midlands Combined Authority and enabled the delivery of improvements to a further 135 properties under the project. As of the end of March 2025, 203 of the 347 properties have been completed and the project is on target to complete within the project deadline of September 2025.

We were also pleased to secure approximately £5 million of grant funding as part of the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund Wave 3. Via this programme we will be partnering with the Department for Energy and Net Zero (DESNZ), Midlands Net Zero Hub and the London Borough of Camden (London Councils) to improve the energy efficiency of around 600 homes across the Midlands and Bexley regions respectively. We will also be match-funding the programme with an additional £5 million investment.

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.