Hometree’s Path to a Greener Future: Action, Impact and Workforce

Sustainability

Why have a sustainability strategy, especially for such a small business as Hometree? For us, it’s about backing our words with actions. Demonstrating that as a business we take our impact seriously and are actively working towards reducing our emissions. We not only want to make sure that we’re installing technologies that are green but also that our wider company, partners, customers and employees are empowered and enabled to join us on this journey. 

We’ve identified three pillars to our strategy. The first priority is to reduce our operational impacts and the second is to scale the positive impacts we can have on the world. Finally, we want to build a workforce that helps the green transition.

Pillar 1 – Operational Impacts

When we’re conducting our business, we need to be mindful of the suppliers we work with, our installers and their impact. We also have to consider the emissions of the buildings that our staff work in. To find out more about our greenhouse gas emissions you can read our first annual impact report here.

At Hometree, we need to go beyond measuring our Scope 1 & 2 emissions alone and start to mitigate them. Therefore we plan to focus on our scope one and two emissions in this pillar where we can actively reduce the impact of our fleet and the energy we consume across all our sites. If you’re a solar installation business, you should have solar on your roof. It just makes sense. And we’re already well on our way to eliminating gas at all our sites. 

Across all our businesses and sites we’re introducing three core priorities: 

• Using renewable electricity in our offices
• All of our fleet using electric vehicles 
• Decarbonising the heat used in our offices

To truly embed this as part of our business we’re auditing each site and working with our group companies to ensure that this is the kind of journey they’re willing to embark on with us. We’re also exploring helping our employees take their journey themselves with an electric vehicle salary sacrifice scheme. We’d hope to be able to extend these employee benefits to cover solar and heat pumps in the future too.

Pillar 2 – Positive Impacts

Scaling our positive impact is central to our business. At Hometree we aim to reduce the impact of people’s homes through electrifying their heating, with heat pumps and enabling them to generate their own energy through solar PV and battery installations. These technologies help reduce emissions not only when they’re installed but in the years to come. We want to ensure that these are accessible to as many homes as possible and have chosen to innovate with Hometree Finance solutions that allow people to pay monthly with a low upfront fee.

By democratising access to sustainable solutions we make it feasible for the widespread adoption of these technologies. When it comes to making a positive difference, data is key. We’ve developed a sophisticated in-house carbon model to understand the impacts of each technology we install on the average home. We’ve used publicly available data, conservative estimates and internal real-world data to inform this model wherever possible. We’ve also been working with our investors 2150 and Aenu to quantify this potential impact on the UK at scale. You can read the full case study at Project Frame.

Pillar 3 – A Green Workforce

We can’t achieve our positive impacts without skilled people with specialist knowledge, installing these sustainable technologies. Recent research from Bain shows that up to four million people may have to retrain by 2030 to help the UK transition to a net-zero economy. Furthermore, the energy and home heating industry will need to create 500,000 roles, many of these coming from existing boiler engineers who could retrain to Heat Pumps.

Hometree has a vital role to play in this transition. We’re supporting our existing network of gas engineers diversifying their skills away from fossil fuels. A Green Workforce doesn’t happen by chance – it requires leadership and a clear vision.

What’s next?

It is all very well having a strategy and a bold vision but now we need to turn this into reality. In this initial phase there’s still a significant amount of data gathering, whether that’s from internal group companies about their energy and vehicle use or external suppliers and the embodied carbon of their goods. From there we can look at where we can have the biggest impacts on our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions and implement both policies and practices to help mitigate these.

We are at the start of this journey (as are our customers), but we now have clear ambitions and targets to work towards. By integrating our next steps into our company objectives and key results we can ensure that sustainability becomes embedded throughout our organisation, going hand in hand with our commercial objectives, and building a business we can all be proud of.

If you’d like to read more download our report here