Businesses to take lead in reducing fuel poverty

Stafford and Rural Homes (SARH) and South Staffordshire Housing Trust Association (SSHA), which own and manage a combined 11,000 homes in Staffordshire, are supporting a challenge for West Midlands businesses to help tackle fuel poverty.

The ‘Hard to Treat’ Challenge is being run by The Built Environment Climate Change Innovations project (BECCI), which is a project partnership between the Universities of Wolverhampton and Coventry. The project aims to support businesses in the West Midlands that can help reduce carbon emissions from existing housing, making them cheaper to keep warm.

BECCI is giving small and medium sized firms, with ideas to help reduce carbon emissions in ‘hard to treat’ homes, the chance to pitch their products or services to SARH and SSHA before a Dragon’s Den style panel.

Karen Armitage, Chief Executive of SARH, said: “We are delighted to take part in this project as we are always keen to look for new and innovative ways to make our homes more eco-friendly and reduce the fuel bills for our customers."

Homes are considered hard to treat when they are difficult to make airtight and insulate or when they don’t have access to mains gas. This includes properties which have solid stone or brick walls, homes made of a mixture of steel and concrete and properties which don’t have lofts. 

There are around 1,500 of these homes within SARH and SSHA’s housing stock and the best ideas in the challenge will be evaluated and considered for implementation within SARH and SSHA’s investment programmes.

Ursula Bennion, director of business development at Housing Plus, which SSHA is a part of, said: “We are continually investing in our housing stock to improve the quality of housing we provide. We recognise that fuel poverty is becoming a significant issue for customers with rising utility costs and people’s household budgets being squeezed.

“We hope that the Hard to Treat challenge will introduce some new innovative ways we can improve the energy efficiency of our homes and in turn the lifestyles of our customers.”

BECCI will also provide additional support to further develop the best ideas.

The assessment criteria for ideas put forward is as follows:

·         Level of improvements (heat loss, net fuel costs to end users, comfort levels and other benefits)

·         Amount of occupier disturbance

·         Time to install

·         Ease of use/training needs

·         Maintenance requirements

·         Costs (installation/set-up, running costs, estimated payback time)

Glenn Barrowman, BECCI Project Manager, said: “Tackling fuel poverty is so important and I am delighted that this challenge is seeking to minimise the energy costs of the customers of our stakeholder partners. We hope to attract some great ideas and The University of Wolverhampton, SARH and SSHA will be evaluating the proposals prior to the selection of the best ideas for presentation at the BECCI challenge panel.”

The closing date for applications is 2^nd September 2013. 

A shortlisting event of the best ideas will held w/c 16^th September. The successful businesses will then be given the opportunity to pitch their ideas to SARH and SSHA.

ENDS

For more information please contact James Allen in the Media Relations Office on 01902 322003

Date Issued: Tuesday 30 July 2013