At AIM we continue to promote collaboration with our peers, believing that positive change is only truly meaningful when shared.
We have recently joined a total of 70 banks, investors and housing providers in becoming early adopters of an industry-led sustainability reporting standard designed to unlock institutional investment to help tackle the UK’s deepening housing crisis.
The working group was set up in 2019 in response to concerns ESG investment was being inhibited by the absence of a common reporting standard. As with many other sectors across the economy, there has been a multitude of ESG reporting frameworks, resulting in reporting that lacked transparency, was prone to inconsistency and was incomparable.
The aim of the Standard is to provide a voluntary reporting framework for housing providers to report on their ESG performance in a transparent, consistent and comparable way. This will make it easier for lenders and investors to assess the ESG performance of housing providers, identify ESG risks and opportunities to create positive social and environmental outcomes.
At AIM we will be using the Standard within our SPECTRUM process, particularly within our analysis of issuers in the UK social housing space. The Standard covers 48 criteria across ESG considerations such as affordability, fire safety and net zero carbon emissions. We support standardisation within the industry and we believe that the Standard is helpful in providing a defined set of ESG disclosures for investors and housing providers alike.
The final report, detailing the Standard and the criteria, can be found here.