Gold award for Octavia’s approach to sustainability

Octavia has been accredited as a gold standard provider of sustainable homes for the third year in a row, in recognition of our success in delivering against our environmental targets.

The accreditation body SHIFT (Sustainable Homes Index For Tomorrow) is the sustainability standard for the housing sector and covers every aspect of our business, from our homes and offices to the way we work. It measures how we are doing over 22 environmental criteria, including CO2 emissions, water use, landfill waste and response to climate change.

Gaining a gold accreditation standard means that Octavia is one of the leading organisations for green homes in the UK and we are currently ranked tenth out of the latest 40 UK housing providers to be assessed.

The assessment commended our approach to delivering new homes built to high sustainability standards – acknowledging our commitment to providing energy efficient, well maintained homes for our residents: “Having 39% of new homes built to a high B rating shows that many developments go above and beyond building regulations.” Through delivering retrofit to our Victoria street properties, we have also made good progress in improving the energy efficiency of our existing homes. Our average SAP score is now 72, which is a good rating considering the age profile of our housing stock.

The report also praises our ambition to keep building on our successes and we scored 13.3 out of 15 for our environmental strategy: “The (Octavia’s) Environmental Strategy 2019-2023 contains precise SMART targets for many environmental issues, including energy efficiency, water efficiency and green transport.”

Work is currently underway to update this strategy and the new version will outline our commitment to achieving net-zero carbon, as well as our plans to address wider environmental impacts such as water consumption, waste, pollution and biodiversity. We have consulted with residents on this important area of work through several meetings and their feedback is reflected in a ‘Resident Action Plan’.