Sanctuary Group – EPC

Sanctuary are one of the country’s largest UK social housing and care providers, with approximately 100,000 units of accommodation across England and Scotland. The not-for-profit organisation have a full range of domestic stock including houses, bungalows, blocks of flats, sheltered schemes and commercial buildings. Pennington Choices were appointed to carry out the void Energy Performance Certificates following a successful tender bid. We were able to offer Sanctuary the nationwide coverage of Energy Assessors to complete their responsive void EPCs as well as EPC projects to assist Sanctuary with their Energy Services.

The Challenge

One of the main issues we faced was gaining access to the properties. The three most common ways to access properties are: Key safes on properties, trade supervisor assistance, and tenant appointments. Due to the nature of our work, a large percentage of our jobs are void properties, this entails access via a key safe. It is vital that this information is clear upon instruction to enable us to access the property first time to complete the job, as this allows us to keep within the agreed KPIs of the contract. This has been a significant challenge across this contract, however our scheduling team have been able to open clear lines of communication with Sanctuary and obtain key contact details for site managers and trade supervisors who operate in various areas to allow our surveyors to contact them if they require access assistance.

What We Did

To date, Pennington Choices have successfully delivered almost 9,000 Energy Performance Certificates for Sanctuary through our pool of Energy Assessors, spanning from Exeter to Aberdeen. We were instructed to: Complete EPC orders within 72 Hours Provide monthly reporting of EPC data Complete projects and provide energy consultation where necessary Sanctuary raise EPC orders on a daily basis. From here, our Programme, Schedule and Dispatch team (PSD) will then allocate out to the respective DEA in that area to undertake the survey and upload the certificate within 72 hours. All of this is managed and processed through our online EPC portal, on which the surveyors, our PSD team and Sanctuary staff have access to the portal. This allows the contract to run seamlessly and all parties can view what stages each job is up to.

Our Achievements

Following our work with Sanctuary, Pennington Choices were successfully awarded a 2-year contract extension in 2017 to February 2019 and then a further year extension in March 2019. As part of the project Pennington Choices offered added value by installing energy efficient lightbulbs as part of the survey. This allowed the Energy assessors to evidence the energy lightbulbs at the time of survey to help increase the property’s energy rating. From this as well as provided energy consultancy, Pennington Choices were awarded a second phase of these works in Scotland. This work helps Sanctuary achieve their EESH (Energy Efficiency in Social Housing) targets. We currently achieve 80% completion of EPCs instructed each month, across all void EPCs instructed.