The Hyde Group is committed to reducing its impact on the environment, and in providing comfortable, affordable homes that are economical to run.

For over 10 years we have been committed to improving the energy efficiency of our homes, either through building new eco-friendly properties or by refurbishing existing ones.

The knowledge we have learnt has been invaluable in developing our expertise and will help in our next goal of rolling out environmental improvements across all our homes. Since 2008 Hyde has achieved the international environment management standard, ISO 14001. This means that not only is our own environmental impact assessed, but also that of our residents.

We therefore provide advice and guidance to help in the reduction of their carbon footprint – a policy which extends to our new build and regeneration programmes ensuring our developments preserve natural resources and do not damage the environment.

Our Environmental Strategy has been updated and refocused to match the vision and values of our residents and staff. The consultation process involved residents focus groups and wider reaching questionnaires. This new strategy outlines our position over the next five years from 2011 to 2016 and is split into the four main areas which Hyde has influence over  in environmental matters: 

• Our Existing Homes,
• Our New Homes,
• Our Office and Work Operations, and
• Our Residents

A copy of the new Sustainability Strategy:

In the exemplar project ‘Retrofit and Replicate’ we piloted a project to retrofit a three bedroom house with technologies to cut CO2 levels by 80 per cent. The data obtained in this project is being used to shape our approach to similar reductions in our other 40,000 homes and we are seeking funding to carry out these improvements.
Lessons learnt here were applied to ‘Phase II, Retrofit and Replicate 2 – Progress’ which is a retrofit house in a conservation area where restrictions are placed on alterations to the exterior of the building.

We are planning to install 400 solar electricity panels before 12th December 2011; where these are installed on houses the resident will benefit from some free electricity, where installed on flats there should be a saving on communal energy use. In every case we are reducing UK carbon emissions.
The panels will be free to residents and are being installed using a grant from Government on roofs where they meet minimum performance criteria. We have carried out a survey using aerial mapping to identify where these roofs are and we will be contacting those residents which can benefit soon.

We want to work with residents to reach a sustainable future through projects and by providing advice through as many outlets as possible. We are setting aside an Environmental Corner in Hyde Life resident newsletter to provide advice; and following resident requests this winter we are providing an energy advisor service to help residents to better understand how to use their home. We’ve listened and this new service is scheduled to start this coming winter, prioritising new movers.
We aren’t just working with individual residents, we are also working with residents in communities via focus groups on making environmental choices through to working on community gardening projects like Growing Communities in Kent and Blooming Stockwell in South London, going forward we’ve got a view to revolutionising estate management elsewhere in Hyde.
We are constructing a Resident Green Zone on the Hyde Group internet site to provide a contact point for sharing knowledge and raising awareness amongst residents on what Hyde is doing, and what services they may be able to benefit from.

Hyde are building homes which meet the highest standards in environmental performance, we are learning all the time and working to produce homes which perform as well in reality as they are supposed to perform on paper. A lot of this is related to the way the resident lives with the property and their understanding of the technologies installed, and the resident advice service is being geared up to help this along.

Our Park Street office has been awarded the Building Research Establishment's Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) "Very Good" level for environmental sustainability.
We have targets in place to achieve significant savings and improvement in energy use, paper consumption, number of miles driven and the amount of landfill waste created across everything we do. All these targets are contained in 'Hyde Environment Matters' and progress is reported quarterly to the Hyde Executive Management Team

Hyde measures its performance against its peers in the housing sector and across other industry groups. A portfolio of KPI’s are presented to the Executive Management Team on a quarterly basis and an annual report will be presented to the Group Board each year.

We have achieved the following:

SHIFT
Hyde achieved a Silver Award in the Shift Assessment 2010. Hyde initially underwent the SHIFT (Sustainable Homes Index for Tomorrow) assessment in 2008 - a scheme where housing associations are assessed for their green credentials. We achieved a Bronze award in 2008 and improved on this to achieve the Silver Award in 2011.
SHIFT has received endorsements from the Mayor of London and the National Housing Federation.

ISO14001
Since 2008 Hyde has maintained an environmental system with international ISO14001 accreditation. This accreditation recognises the systems Hyde has in place to minimise the impact with have on the environment as we manage and maintain our homes.