Altair: helping embed sustainability into every part of the housing sector
“Try and take a more holistic view of opportunities as you are decarbonising; avoid going forward on a very narrow tunnel vision of just carbon.“
Our Alliance is made up of 17 leaders in sustainability, supporting organisations on their journey to net zero. We’re introducing each alliance member, sharing more about their unique and special skillset, and how they are supporting organisations across London to reach net zero through the Zero Carbon Accelerator.
Here, Altair shares their thoughts on how the housing sector can approach collaboration and leadership in their decarbonisation journey.
Meet alliance member Annabel Gray, Director of Sustainability
How can you help organisations requesting support from the Zero Carbon Accelerator? What sets you apart?
Annabel: We specialise in the affordable housing sector and have a holistic understanding and approach to our work. We’re not the boots on the ground; it’s more helping our clients with the strategic approach.
For affordable housing providers, this means that we don’t view sustainability in isolation. We understand how things work from a financial perspective, a governance perspective and the challenges they are facing due to building safety or repairs and maintenance. With all our work we can lean on our asset management, building safety, community impact team, governance, and procurement team and so on.
If you’re going to be implementing an organisational environmental sustainability strategy, it’s going to impact every element across the business from people and culture through to policies and processes. I help teams create a successful transformation programme that the business can implement, factoring in the changes that need to take place in each department to become a more sustainable business.
Why did your organisation want to be part of the Zero Carbon Accelerator alliance?
Annabel: We were keen to be part of a programme that can drive high levels of impact. A lot of the work I do is for individual clients, which is great but on a smaller scale. I think it’s exciting to be part of the Zero Carbon Accelerator because the outputs that each alliance member will deliver will hopefully pack a punch that quite a few organisations can benefit from.
Housing at the moment is very topical, especially as we have this goal of delivering 1.5 million homes between 2025 and 2030. We’ve got a lot of housing stock existing in London, a variety of quality archetypes, listed and unlisted, which is a big nut to crack. Being able to support public sector bodies to deliver solutions, which can be adopted by all, would be amazing.
Ultimately everyone’s on the same journey, everyone’s trying to achieve the same goal, and London is on a quicker mission to get there than others. There are going to be lessons learned from us in the Alliance that we can upscale and hopefully strengthen the force of our collective knowledge.
What do you think is the most important part of the decarbonisation journey for organisations to think about?
Annabel: Looking at it holistically and not in silos.
I think the sector can sometimes fall into a trap of ‘carbon tunnel’ vision. For example, if you’re looking at retrofit, organisations often just look at energy efficient retrofit. Try and take a more holistic view of opportunities as you are decarbonising; avoid going forward on a very narrow tunnel vision of just carbon.
“Those at the top, those leading, need to be shouting from the top. They need to be behind the sustainability team, advocating for them to break that programme down and create accountability across the whole organisation.”
Having strong ownership and leadership is key too. I’ve often seen large corporates assume that sustainability is just for the sustainability team to deal with. But typically, the sustainability team is tiny, or there’s not even a team. Those at the top, those leading, need to be shouting from the top. They need to be behind that team, advocating for them to break that programme down and create accountability across the whole organisation.
Are there any resources or tools that you think are most important to organisations as they decarbonise their buildings?
Annabel: The Future Homes Hub has some great resources. It’s a collaboration between private sector, public sector developers as well as contractors, landowners, and those in the built environment trying to improve future homes. They’ve got some amazing tools, research papers, guidance note standards, and most recently, whole life carbon assessment tool. As we continue building more homes, we need to be held to account for the materials we use, their embodied carbon, and their end-of-life impact.
There’s also some really cool stuff on the UK Green Building Council’s website.
What excites you most about the journey to net zero for London?
Annabel: There are new projects and technologies that excite me, like Nexgen. It’s infrared technology that comes as ceiling tiles or wallpaper and it uses infrared to heat objects in the room rather than the air. It’s massively popular so far in the healthcare system. For example, a couple of ceiling tiles are being used over a patient’s bed, keeping the patient feeling warm, but the NHS workers aren’t overheating because the whole area isn’t being heated to a very hot temperature.
If you’ve got properties which haven’t got space for the heat pump tech, Nexgen is brilliant. I think it could be a fantastic solution for flats and urban living.
There are things I’m excited about but there are things that worry me too. The narrative we hear sometimes is ‘build, build, build’, but there needs to be resources and planning to make sure these new homes are being delivered in line with net zero goals.
For any organisation working towards net zero: what’s one piece of advice you have around collaboration?
Annabel: Many of the organisations I’ve worked with can see knowledge as a power and hold their cards close to their chest. It seems counterproductive to see ‘organisation X’ over there investing in a project that’s the same as ‘organisation Y’, when you know they could both benefit by partnering up. We need to be more transparent.
For example, Cardiff University’s Welsh School of Architecture came together with various housing providers who put forward a selection of their stock to work together on solutions that could work for different archetypes, look at what’s financially viable and talk about grant funding and finance models. They’ve shared that with housing providers across Wales so all those findings can be used to progress that kind of work.
Everyone is doing their best and is often sharing as much as they can but held back by higher powers or confidentiality. We’ve seen that sharing data does make a difference though, and I really encourage it where possible.
The Mayor of London is delivering the Zero Carbon Accelerator in collaboration with Mott MacDonald, Energy Saving Trust and an alliance of experts: ACA Studios, Altair, Ambue, Arthian, ClimateView, COWI, EEVS, Energiesprong UK, ERM, IES, Pascall+Watson Architects, Pollard Thomas Edwards, Retrofit Academy, S&J Consulting and Zerogram.
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