Anchor, England’s largest not-for-profit provider of specialist housing and care for people in later life, has been successful in securing revenue grant funding to improve communal heating systems at three of its housing developments.
Anchor will receive more than £45,000 from the Heat Network Efficiency Scheme [HNES], funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Anchor will use the funding to carry out optimisation surveys on the performance of communal heating systems at Hurst Place, Haywards Heath in West Sussex, Jubilee Lodge in Cramlington, Northumberland and Birch Court, an extra care scheme in Leicester. These housing locations each have a central boiler room which supply a combined 140 homes.
The three locations have been selected for surveys due to the different types of heating systems in place at each site. Once the optimisation studies are complete and upgrade work has been identified, it is expected that future rounds of HNES funding will offer the opportunity to bid for capital grant funding to carry out the improvement works across a range of Anchor locations.
This work will identify system improvements to ensure high performance and maximum efficiency, aiming to lower heating costs for residents, improve comfort levels and reduce carbon emissions.
Liz Davenport, Property Sustainability Director at Anchor, said: “We’re delighted to have been successful in our bid. Greening our customers’ homes and communities, lowering heating costs and reducing carbon emissions is a key aim for us. With these funds, and our own significant investment, we will be able to do that.
“We have been engaging with our customers on the need to green homes and communities as part of our Environmental Sustainability and Net Zero Carbon Strategy which sets out high level targets and a pathway to meeting the net zero carbon target by 2050.”
The HNES funding follows Anchor’s successful bid earlier in the year for funding to retrofit homes in wave 2.1 of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund as part of the Greener Futures Partnership.
The five partners within the GFP — Anchor, Abri, Home Group, Hyde Group and Sanctuary secured more than £40m in funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund to retrofit over 5,000 homes. With £2.5m towards energy efficiency works on 341 of Anchor’s homes, bringing them up to at least an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) C.
As part of the Greener Futures Partnership, Anchor is also exploring how to meet the national skills gap in the world of sustainability and retrofitting, with the GFP releasing a new report, Better Insulate than Never, in Parliament, in collaboration with the The Centre for Social Justice.
The new report shows that decarbonising our homes will not just reduce energy bills for customers, but that it’s also a unique opportunity to create high quality green jobs for people in the communities we serve.
