Rural Housing Week - Investing in our homes

Every year, Connexus invests, where needed, its profits back into your homes. This year, our work program focuses on improving our existing houses by completing internal improvements, which include replacing kitchens, bathrooms, boilers, full heating, and any rewiring that is needed. 

We will also be looking at external works; replacing roofs, windows, exterior wall insulation, and updating internal communal areas 

Our goal is to work alongside our customer lead focus groups that we have in place, to help us improve our policies and procedures to give you a better service and to invest our money where it is needed and to get customer feedback around this. 

As part of these improvement works we will be spending £2.5million on energy efficiency work in a bid to reduce fuel poverty within our rural communities. Something that within our rural settings is higher than the national average; and something we are committed to doing something about. Fuel poverty itself has been found to have great adverse impacts upon health and wellbeing through the associated financial hardship as well as increased risk of medical conditions such as respiratory illness. Connexus wants to provide customers with homes that are it for purpose, warm and energy efficient. 

Not only are we improving individual homes, part of our investment programme will be looking at entire regeneration projects in areas within Herefordshire and Shropshire. Part of this work is also being funded through Connexus Warmer Homes Project, part funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The regeneration projects will look at future proofing our homes for customers, making them energy efficient and more comfortable to live in.  

Our main focus is improving lives by building homes in places that people want to live, and also homes that they can afford to heat and live in. Connexus is committed to working in rural communities – building to ensure that those communities continue to thrive, keeping schools and facilities open by providing homes for young families with a local connection, and providing homes for those whose circumstances may have changed due to age, disability or other life events.  

Our current commitment is to build 250 new homes across our two counties each year. Despite a global pandemic, which saw construction site closures across England for 2 months and the challenges that social distancing on site has brought us, we have still created 189 homes this year (2020-21).   

Our development programme outlines that during the next few years we anticipate building new homes across Shropshire and Herefordshire. 
 
2021-22 - we anticipate providing new homes across a number of sites in Hereford city, Ledbury and Orleton in Herefordshire, and in Oswestry, Minsterley, Highley, Cleobury Mortimer and Broseley in Shropshire.  

2022-23 - we will be providing further homes in Orleton, Moreton on Lugg, Canon Pyon and Ledbury in Herefordshire as well as homes in Telford, St Martins, Dorrington, Bishops Castle, Ditton Priors and Much Wenlock.  

Our list is expanding all the time as we secure new build opportunities across our counties.  

As well as supporting rural communities and ensuring quality homes, we’re now looking towards the future and the environmental credentials of our properties. Building for the future is really important. In 2018 we built 12 homes in Much Wenlock, which achieved Passivhaus accreditation. The homes won awards for their design and residents were delighted to find that their homes cost very little to heat, saving them hundreds of pounds in fuel costs each year. We will continue to commit to looking at environmental factors within our homes moving forwards. 
 
With the government’s drive to reduce carbon emissions by 68% by 2030, 78% by 2035 and to achieve net carbon zero by 2050, we’re actively working towards achieving these goals. We’ve chosen to build on our success at Much Wenlock with a view to creating a new ‘standard’ house type which meets the Passivhaus standards, but which we can easily roll out to ALL our future development schemes. This would mean that we would be 2050 compliant, well in advance, and should not need to make any further big changes to our house types for some time unless we wish to. 

As part of this project we are looking at the feedback we have received from our first Passivhaus scheme (good and bad), as well as feedback received from our other residents in our tenant surveys so that we can incorporate a myriad of improvements as part of this overhaul of our new build house types. 

The future looks bright for Connexus and our counties.