England
Platform Coordinator
NHF - The National Housing Federation represents 1200 not-for-profit independent housing associations and is the voice of affordable housing in England. Our members provide 2,5 million homes to 5 million people. Housing associations also provide much-needed neighbourhood services such as education and training schemes or financial inclusion services for the benefit of the whole community and are in business for neighbourhoods. The Federation supports and promotes the work that they do and campaign for better housing and neighbourhoods.
Description of the Platform
The English National POWER HOUSE Platform is led by NHF - The National Housing Federation. Members of the Platform are all NHF’s members, since energy issues and sustainability are at the core of English housing providers. The Platforms involves also several Government’s Departments as well as legal and financial institutions and can count on the benefit from cooperating with key environmental organisations. The Platform works to provide its members, and particularly housing associations, with neutral information on energy efficiency and use of renewables by facilitating the exchange of knowledge and good practices between its members and serves also as a lobbying vehicle to raise housing associations’ voice on the new challenges that the sector is facing.
Platform Strategy
“For the Federation, POWER HOUSE adds a useful European complement to on-going work to assist housing associations in developing and implementing energy efficiency and renewable energy strategies, serving as a channel for exchange of useful advice, case studies and contacts. POWER HOUSE is also a source of information on wider legislative developments such as rent restructuring, already implemented in other EU countries, and likely to have a significant effect on financing retrofitting for housing associations if implemented in Britain. The Members survey showed that the associations want information on the benefits and advantages of different approaches to meeting the UK code for sustainable homes, in particular they also want to hear about experiences in improving hard to treat properties and better ways of communicating technical data to residents.” - Ms Olivia Powis, former National Housing Federation POWER HOUSE Platform coordinator.
“Difficulty in obtaining grants coupled with high costs of meeting standards is an obstacle for members therefore mobilisation of public funds for energy efficiency in social housing is central to the role of the platform. Meetings organised so far have all served to promote public and private investment to housing associations, with a particular focus on accessing European Regional Development Funding. These meetings have been followed by individual lobbying of the Regional Development Authorities who manage ERDF funds to ensure that the funds are made available to retrofit social housing stock.” - Ms Corine Meier, National Housing Federation POWER HOUSE Platform coordinator.
Following a performance review, the Platform Coordinator has issued an updated strategy statement and priorities going forward:
"Currently, there is no legal way for housing associations to recoup the costs of green investment in their social housing stock. This is being changed at present with the introduction of the Green Deal, which will allow for a repayment mechanism through savings made on energy bills. As the Federation for housing associations in England, we will carry on lobbying the UK government to ensure the Green Deal delivers for social housing landlords. Large-scale retrofit programmes and large-scale renewable programmes lead to the need for products and labour that is available and skilled. One of the key issues that needs to be looked into is ensuring that we upskill and prepare our workforce so that there are enough qualified people. We should also bear in mind that successful retrofitting depends to a large extent on consumers amending their behaviour and understanding how to use the technology effectively; to this end, we will look at identifying current researches and methods of ensuring social housing energy consumers realise savings on their bills. Finance is also a key issue for housing associations everywhere and in England in particular since budgets have been cut and in particular the social housing development pot has been slashed. As we have already done in the past, we will help our members in looking at EIB finance as a source of cheap finance. We will also help members working in partnership and access EU finance such as ELENA to identify the best legal partnership form." - Ms Corine Meier, National Housing Federation POWER HOUSE Platform coordinator.
