The Chartered Institute of Housing conference & exhibition 2013 is less than three weeks away and doubtless your diary is filling up with a bewildering schedule of conference sessions, coffee meetings, lunches and drinks. All are important for helping you build contacts, generate new business opportunities and serve your tenants better. But there’s one fixture that you literally can’t afford to miss at CIH this year: a visit to the Green Room.
The Green Room is an open surgery held by award winning experts offering essential advice to landlords on how to become more sustainable. Visitors can attend a combination of seminars and one to one appointments that allows them to find out how to cut carbon emissions from their stock and boost their organisation’s green credentials - and receive honest, answers from sector leaders. These include trailblazing landlords such as Gentoo, which is one of the few to push ahead with the government’s green deal scheme, and Places for People which has set up a green services company offering consultancy advice. There are also experts from consultancy Sustainable Homes which runs the SHIFT index of the 53 greenest housing associations, built environment consultancy and standards assessors BRE, and leading contractor Willmott Dixon.
So why should a visit to the green room be made a priority when your organisation is likely to have its hands full dealing with the impact of welfare reform and a raft of major changes in the sector? Well, firstly, it could help mitigate the impact with these changes on your organisation and tenants. And secondly, it is completely free to attend – yet just half an hour in the Green Room could save your organisation millions of pounds.
So how does it work, and how can you get involved?
The Green Room is a combination of seminars, presentations, case studies and networking events. If you have few contacts in sustainability, then you might want to attend a ‘speed dating’ session in which participants have 15 minutes in to meet 15 key people who are setting the agenda on all things green.
‘People on the stands will be able to give practical tips,’ explains Mr Eagles. ‘If you want to do something to do with energy saving engagement with residents then they will be able see “we have done that lots of times before and here are some ways forward”. People can get up to date information – and that can either be through a two minute chat, or over a 40 minute chat with a coffee. Normally you might have to travel an hour and a half to have an hour long discussion with someone and then travel and hour and a half back again. It makes much more sense at the Green Room.’
Common sense is now at the heart of sustainability. Going green is no longer a fluffy aspiration – it’s become an economic necessity.