Baker Homes Blog

• Project by Baker Homes and Hastoe Housing gets go ahead from government innovation agency
• Tool could help those building new homes and maintaining existing ones to make better business decisions

The government’s innovation agency, Innovate UK has awarded a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) funding to help develop an analytical tool that will help social landlords harness ‘big data’ for decision making.   The tool will use data from multiple sources, such as build and land costs, housing need and market rates to enable decisions on where and what type of homes to build.  

Baker Homes is delighted to announce the appointment of Bevan Jones as new Managing Director.

Now more than ever we need to be building new homes. The UK Government has set the ambitious target to build one million homes by 2025, this means building a minimum of 250,000 new homes per year; an uplift of over 100,000 homes. This represents a huge challenge for the sector.

Evidencing sustainability credentials is becoming increasingly important to businesses. Companies who have a plan to deal with climate change, which place sustainability at the core of their business and who report regularly on their progress usually outperform those who do not.

There is increasing attention being paid to design versus as-built energy use. Some homes that were built to higher standards were tested and found not to be delivering the energy performance that had been specified – sometimes significantly underperforming. Understanding the reasons behind this ‘performance gap’ is vital to ensuring that new build homes are warmer, more comfortable to live in and cheaper to run.

Northward Housing Group are now accredited as one of the top six most sustainable landlords in the country.   We asked them what process they went through to get there, which areas they focused on, and what were some of the challenges.  The following is a summary.  We thought that might be of interest.

We are often asked how can we help my team or department understand fuel poverty.

Over the last year we have spent time and energy developing short 25 minute elearning modules on identifying fuel poverty, steps to take to reduce it, asset management, renewable, operational efficiency, sustainability and other issues. Costs are as low as £4 per person. See following a short summary of the training you can take from the comfort of your own desk...

There is much anecdotal evidence that living in a more energy efficient home leads to fewer tenants going in to arrears, but little concrete evidence.  A new study is setting out to solve this.

It can be difficult addressing the challenges of fuel poverty with attention currently focused on how to keep cool. However, it is important to continue working towards reducing the numbers of households in fuel poverty before the next heating period.

The Annual Fuel Poverty Statistics report was recently published; presenting the latest statistical trends and analysis relating to fuel poverty in 2013. This blog takes a closer look at who the fuel poor are and the key differences in the statistics from 2024 to 2013.

New research was published last week on the work registered social landlords are doing to improve their environmental performance. Environmental benchmarking is improving processes and helping to save thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions and millions of cubic meters of water, as well as improving the homes and lives of residents.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching on Saturday there is a lot of talk about love and happiness. It may just be that housing can provide the NHS with quite a nice Valentines present by reducing health visits by the thousands and saving the NHS millions. But how?

We all know there is a link between quality of housing and health of residents. We were commissioned by the London Climate Change Partnership (LCCP); to investigate the actual costs and benefits of considering adapting our homes to a changing climate. The work analysed the impact of adaptation works to 200 homes in the Colne and Mersea tower blocks in Barking and Dagenham in London, to provide evidence to help landlords make the case for adaptation.

As consumers, we are becoming more aware of the environmental impact that our choices have and as such the demand for eco –friendly products has dramatically increased. This trend can be seen within the home décor sector, with interior textiles from an ethical and renewable background increasingly being sourced.