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Sustainability is best defined as meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs
Sustainability is best defined as meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. By providing new housing our business clearly meets a fundamental requirement of today’s communities, but in carrying out our operations we seek to mitigate their effect on the environment and endeavour to meet our wider responsibilities to the society and economy in which we work. This is a thread running through the Group from land buying policy, to the engineering design of our development sites, the architectural design and specification of our homes, the management of our construction works and in the general conduct of the business.
Our developments provide more than just new homes for a broad range of local household needs and affordability. The potential consequences for the existing physical and community infrastructure are mitigated typically through the provision of new or enhanced facilities on site or financial contributions to support improvements on a range of neighbourhood amenities including transport, schools, libraries and leisure facilities. During 2020 the Group contributed £3.1m towards such improvements, representing £6.6k for each new home built in the year.
As part of our desire for high quality placemaking in our developments, we put great emphasis on landscape quality, seeking wherever possible to retain valued features and using carefully designed new planting to enhance it. Similarly, many of our schemes incorporate a wide variety of measures to mitigate the effect of development on native wildlife species, or indeed maximise opportunities to create new habitats. In these ways we are able to enrich the bio-diversity of completed Croudace developments.
In other areas of the business, various measures have been implemented to reduce the carbon footprint of our operations. These include the use of photovoltaic panels and energy efficient controlled lighting; a modern and fuel efficient car fleet of which 30% now incorporate electric or hybrid engine technology, and broadening the use of information technology to reduce the need for car journeys. These are all practical measures which, in addition to their wider environmental benefits, have enabled us to reduce business overhead costs.
