Longhurst Group

CLIENT

• Longhurst Group

CLIENT INDUSTRY

• Social Housing

SERVICES PROVIDED

• Sustainability strategy development

LOCATION

• Midlands and East of England

DATE

• September 2021 to January 2022

CHALLENGE
Longhurst Group is one of the largest housing groups in the Midlands and East of England, and owns and manages over 23,500 homes and delivers a wide range of care and support services. They operate in 50 local authority areas, employ 1,200 staff, have 10 office bases and over 80 care and support locations.

While Longhurst had been working on many aspects of sustainability for several years, including social sustainability and decarbonisation, they had not yet pulled this work together holistically and developed an organisation wide sustainability strategy.

SOLUTION
Savills worked alongside Longhurst Group to deliver a bespoke strategy that aligned to their wider business strategy. At Savills, we believe that an effective sustainability strategy understands stakeholder priorities, business requirements, and seizes opportunities for improvement to build on good work already undertaken.

To develop the strategy the following process was followed:

• Peer Review – A high-level review of where Longhurst Group currently perform against existing environment and sustainability metrics against their peers and broader orangisation types. This review outlined the types of objectives and targets committed to by similar organisations and provided Longhurst with a market position.
• Legal Review - The high-level Legal Review outlined where action will be required against current and future legislation and identified where there may be a requirement to acknowledge legal compliance within the environment and sustainability policy.
• Workshops - Three workshops were developed and delivered for a broad group of internal stakeholders. This was designed to ensure good understanding of Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) issues, eliminate unconscious bias and to support the scoring of material issues.
• Materiality - Materiality Assessment assessing stakeholder importance for key and high-level material issues and their effect on the organisation was undertaken, in line with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) methodology.
• ESG / Sustainability Policy and Action Plan/Roadmap – Informed by the processes undertaken a policy and action plan/roadmap for Longhurst was drafted.

RESULTS AND OUTPUT
The principal outputs for this project were:

• A peer and regulatory review;
• x3 sustainability workshops packages framed around E, S and G
• A materalitiy assessment report;
• ESG / Sustainability Policy including a sustainability Purpose and Vision ;
• Group level objectives covering environmental, social and governance issues and a draft action plan roadmap for implementation (designed to be complimentary to existing decarbonisation roadmap);
• Governance and reporting recommendations;
• Alignment to UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing.