Asset Management Challenges – Net Zero

As if life wasn’t difficult enough for social housing providers, their asset management challenges now include the need to retrofit millions of homes to net zero carbon standards. Others include chronic skilled labour shortages and repair and compliance backlogs partly resulting from the pandemic.

But net zero isn’t going away – and neither is the need to bring all stock up to at least EPC Band C by 2030. How are social landlords integrating plans for net zero into asset management strategies?

The first objective is to define what net zero means. The calculation isn’t fixed as the electricity grid will be progressively decarbonised. Net zero in practice is heavily influenced by human behaviour, which is hardly easy to manage.

But there are many practicalities that can be addressed. These include setting appropriate decarbonisation targets, defining the retrofit actions needed for different property types, designing the supply chains needed for delivery, and planning the work at a high level to assess resource needs and budgets.

A Different Approach to Asset Management

Delivering net zero social housing alongside other priorities will call for a different approach to asset management. Fragmented service delivery, micro management and manual systems aren’t up to the task. Digitally-enabled ways of working need to become the norm.

A recent Inside Housing survey showed that 89% of landlords had never used BIM for works on existing stock. Use of IT and data within the social housing sector is inconsistent, whether for repairs or compliance. We know, for example, that many social landlords have critical compliance data distributed across multiple supplier spreadsheets and databases in different formats.

Better data management has to be central to the way that social housing providers tackle all asset management issues. This opens opportunities to join up different responsibilities and work streams and achieve rationalisation and efficiencies.

Building Safety

Decarbonisation for many properties will include fitting external wall insulation. There’s an obvious overlap here with responsibilities for fire safety under new legislation. This is another case for integrated planning and management.

Other actions needed to achieve net zero will include replacement windows and doors. Much of this can be rationalised if this work is carefully integrated with relevant repair and maintenance planning. Similar arguments apply to the need to phase out gas boilers in favour of heat pumps.

The key is not to look at net zero as a discrete asset management issue but part of a wider picture of holistic service delivery.

For more information about Osborne’s approach to asset management contact Jo Fletcher ([email protected]) or visit our resource centre.