Jigsaw Homes Group has today become one of the first housing providers in the country to sign up to an industry-led sustainability reporting standard, designed to unlock investment to help tackle the UK’s deepening housing crisis.
The aim of the standard is to provide a voluntary reporting framework for housing providers to report on their Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) performance in a transparent, consistent and comparable way.
This will make it easier for lenders and investors to assess the ESG performance of housing providers, identify ESG risks and opportunities to create positive social and environmental outcomes.
A working group was set up in 2019 in response to concerns ESG investment was being held back by the absence of a common reporting standard. As with many other sectors across the economy, there has been a large number of ESG reporting frameworks, resulting in reporting that lacked transparency, was prone to inconsistency and was incomparable.
Claire Brightley, Sustainability Manager at Jigsaw Group said: “We wanted to adopt this new framework as it will help us to show the journey we are on towards becoming a more sustainable and transparent organisation, and help us to unlock new sources of finance.
“Reporting against the framework criteria will help us to tell a clear story every year of where we’re at and how we are working to improve our environmental, social and governance performance.”
This will be linked to Jigsaw’s Sustainability Strategy which is currently being developed.
Jigsaw is one of 39 housing associations and 31 lenders and investors across the UK to have committed to become early adopters of the standard. Housing providers taking part will report against the standard on an annual basis.
Meanwhile lenders and investors, including Lloyds Bank, LGIM Real Assets, M&G and NatWest, have agreed to use the standard in their investment and credit policies, processes and/or product design.
The standard covers 48 criteria across ESG considerations such as affordability, fire safety and net zero carbon emissions.
The final report, detailing the standard and the criteria, can be found at www.esgsocialhousing.co.uk
