This substantial grant, coupled with our own further investment, will enable efficiency improvements to be made by retrofitting more than 200 Cottsway homes over the next 3 years.

Depending on the requirement of each individual property, this work could include a variety of energy saving measures, such as:

• Installing cavity wall insulation
• Installing or improving loft insulation
• Installing solar panels
• Replacing electric and oil heating with air source heating.

We were delighted to hear that we were among 127 ‘Challenge Fund’ projects and 17 Strategic Partnership projects announced by the Government earlier this week. Each will receive part of a total of £1.29bn funding to support housing associations and local authorities to retrofit social housing.

We have worked with a selected partner to identify homes most in need of improvement for this WH:SHF-funded project, using analysis of housing surveys and data modelling.

Richard Reynolds, our Chief Executive, said “One of our key objectives is to ensure we provide safe, good quality and affordable homes for our customers and we want to reduce the carbon footprint moving forward, particularly of our older homes.

“By 2030, we want to achieve an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of at least a C for all our properties as part of our net zero strategy. It is costly to make energy efficiency improvements and we’re extremely grateful that we’ve been chosen to receive this grant.

“We were fortunate to have received Government funding for another project of this kind in 2023 which is enabling us to update over 140 of older homes with energy-saving measures. We have learnt a lot from this project and will use this knowledge as we embark on the next phase of work to deliver improvements in even more homes - helping us to reduce our carbon footprint and, importantly, help to reduce household energy bills and tackle fuel poverty.”

We currently own around 5,800 properties, have more than 12,300 customers and are West Oxfordshire’s largest affordable housing provider. We also have homes in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. We are investing £85m between 2020 and 2030 in maintaining and improving our homes, with a focus on safety, meeting Government standards and reducing carbon emissions.

At this time, more than three quarters of our homes are EPC-rated C, with rest rated D or below. Nationally, the average rating for a home is D.