Sustainability for Housing (SfH) has announced a partnership with Housemark that will take environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting across the UK social housing sector to the next level and provide even greater value to its adopter community.
The new collaboration between SfH, the steward of the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing (SRS), and Housemark, the leading housing data and insights company, will mean a centralised portal for sustainability reporting, supported by benchmarking and analytics capabilities, and an extra layer of validation as part of the annual reporting cycle.
The SRS was co-designed by social landlords and financial institutions to help the housing sector measure, report and enhance its ESG performance in a transparent, consistent and comparable way. More than 130 housing providers and funders have adopted the SRS since 2020, representing more than 2.3 million homes and the vast majority of the £130bn of debt facilities in the sector.
With demand for clear ESG reporting heightening over recent years, SfH has appointed Housemark to help ensure ESG disclosure is effectively collated, consistently measured and clearly communicated to a wide range of stakeholders. This will in turn enable interested parties – from funders to residents – to better scrutinise the sector’s ESG progress and performance and risk management.
Housemark’s expertise in data analytics and benchmarking will result in the publication of an annual data repository and allow housing providers to create actionable insights that enhance their ESG journeys, while fostering transparency and sector-wide learning. With a member base of more than 350 social landlords across the UK, Housemark already collects and stores data from ESG reports, and has the infrastructure and mechanisms in place to ensure seamless delivery for SfH. Housemark’s extensive network also presents an opportunity to further promote the SRS more widely across the sector.
Piers Williamson, Chair of SfH, said: “The SRS is the golden thread for ESG and sustainability reporting in social housing, driving greater accountability, strengthening its story to a whole range of stakeholders and preparing housing providers for a new era of financial and sustainability reporting. Robust data is integral to all of this – and partnering with Housemark allows us to tap into its well-established data analysis capabilities, bringing enhanced reporting and benchmarking capabilities to the SRS. This collaboration ensures that social housing providers can focus on demonstrating their sustainability impact, while we deliver the insight that investors need to make informed decisions.”
Andrew Jackson, Director of Partnerships at Housemark, said: “We’re excited to collaborate with Sustainability for Housing to advance the consistency and quality of ESG reporting in social housing. Housemark’s expertise in data collection and analysis will ensure that the metrics used to gauge sustainability are accurate and reliable, enabling providers to present a clear and comprehensive picture of their ESG credentials to investors.”
Housemark will enable SfH to further strengthen its offering to the sector by enhancing ESG benchmarking capabilities. This includes integrating SfH’s ESG metrics into Housemark’s benchmarking system, helping providers keep pace with evolving standards with an easily comparable dataset.
