Legal and General Property announces the publication of their Retail Occupiers Guide to sustainable property. The aim is to equip leisure tenants with a thorough understanding of the environmental impact of property and the necessary toolkit to implement change.
As one of the largest UK institutional property fund managers, with £10.1bn of property assets under management, LGP is very serious about its role in minimising the impact of the built environment, but recognises that in order to implement fundamental change it needs to go beyond measures within its own control and reach out to its tenants, partners, agents, suppliers and the wider industry. Indeed, with a sustainability strategy centred on maximising the efficiency and sustainability of its portfolio, it believes in the fundamental importance of working with tenants to take these changes to the next level.
Inspiring occupiers to accept that they have an important part to play in carbon reduction and educating them on the real and significant cost savings that can be achieved through simple but critical changes to the running of a property, the guide aims to forge a link between landlords and tenants in tackling change. It is broken down into seven key categories of sustainable action, namely waste management, energy, buying goods and services, paper, water, travel, and corporate and social responsibility.
Culminating in a list of next steps, the guide recommends establishing a Building Management Committee, through which LGP’s representative managing agents can work together with its tenants to create bespoke sustainability action plans for each building and then put these cost saving, energy efficiencies into motion. The guide also highlights major success stories of retail initiatives that have already been put in place, such as at Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre where, by improving recycling, it halved the total waste disposal costs of the centre. Similarly, there is a case study on Midsummer Place in Milton Keynes, where, by making a simple but significant change to its cleaning operations, it reduced its service charge costs by a total of £80,000 pa and its utility use by 25%.
Representing just one of the many commitments the Company has made to the green agenda over the past few years, it follows the ‘Office Occupiers’ Guide’, launched in July last year, and LGP’s Sustainability Review and Strategy report, which was brought out just last month to provide a thorough review of the significant “green” successes it has achieved to date and an overview of its strategy and targets going forward.
As set out in this report, a number of factors have informed LGP’s approach to sustainability, including rising costs of energy, changing legislation and evolving stakeholder expectations. It has now set individual targets across the main business areas of fund management, asset management, development and refurbishment and property management. Against this, LGP has identified key areas of priority which are sustainability risk management, climate change and energy, resource use and environment and sustainable communities.
With a robust environmental risk model in place for all new assets and investment processes, LGP considers sustainability as a key element of its due diligence process when evaluating the purchase of a property and over the next three years aims to review all assets for climate change risks and develop asset specific strategies. The Company will also seek to minimise waste direct to landfill wherever LGP is responsible for waste management, targeting the 10 largest waste producing sites to reduce the proportion of waste to landfill by 20% below 2010 levels and provide energy efficiency savings of 5% on all properties where CRC data has been provided.
Furthermore, as a minimum, it will seek to achieve BREEAM ‘Excellent’ or an equivalent benchmark for all development projects and retain ISO 14001 accreditation for all relevant properties within its portfolio. Finally, it will continue to seek significant reductions in energy use, focusing on those properties which use the most energy and therefore where the most real impact can be made.
Source : Legal and General Property
