Sustainable development
We design our development schemes to meet the Homes and Communities Agency’s Design and Quality Standards, and to achieve the Code for Sustainable Homes and Housing Quality Indicator (HQI) levels set by them for all housing projects that receive social housing grant. We have committed to the 2012 Construction Commitments developed on the Construction Clients’ Charter concepts.
Through the use of appropriate technology, we constantly strive to make our homes more energy-efficient and cost-effective for homeowners to run.
Code for Sustainable Homes
The Government introduced the Code for Sustainable Homes to drive a step-change in sustainable home building practice. It is a standard for key design and construction elements of a single national standard for sustainable homes.
The Code offers specific benefits for social housing providers. Homes with greater energy and water efficiency will have lower running costs, which can help to reduce fuel poverty. Homes built to the Code will enhance the comfort and satisfaction of tenants. Social housing providers building to the Code will demonstrate their sustainability credentials to the public, tenants and funding bodies.
Delivering sustainable housing
Creating sustainable communities is about creating places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. It is also about creating communities that will improve everyone’s quality of life. Sovereign is committed to delivering on this key Government priority and helping to ensure that the communities we are involved in support people of all ages, races, nationalities and genders and meet sustainable development principles.
When designing and building housing, we consult with the local community whose views help to shape designs and also work with community groups to ensure they receive the relevant training on planning and design to enable their involvement throughout this key process. As part of designing and building new homes, we also look at the public realm in the surrounding area, to ensure landscaping, play areas, public seating and community art accommodate and meet the needs of the neighbourhood and compliment the wider community.
Sustainable building technologies
We have a long-term plan to help residents reduce their carbon footprint. Our starting point is to design and build standard house types that meet the Code for Sustainable Homes with the minimum use of green technology. We take this approach because green technology is moving so fast: its cost is falling and its efficiency is increasing. We have already adopted green technologies in some of our developments. We continue to monitor a range of green technologies, including solar thermal, photovoltaic (PV) cells, and ground and air source heat pumps, to evaluate their cost-effectiveness and see how they impact residents’ lifestyles.
New Government green incentives, such as feed-in tariffs, will influence our use of electricity-generating technologies like PV cells in future. We continually look at the whole-lifetime costs and benefits to us and our residents from schemes such as these, and use the outcome of this research to specify better green technologies to help us meet the Code for Sustainable homes, and help our residents reduce fuel bills and ongoing running costs.
