Thank you. Thank you. Okay, good morning, everyone, a very warm welcome to Harworth's head office at Advantage House. Thank you so much to everybody who's made the journey to be here today. We've got some exciting sessions and site tours lined up. I hope you have a really good day, hopefully also that the Yorkshire weather doesn't disappoint. I have been promised sunshine, we'll see. Also thank you to everyone who's joined online for today's presentation. I'd like to begin with an overview of what we're aiming to achieve from today. Firstly, I'm going to do a brief update on current trading conditions and our operational and strategic progress. We're going to take a deep dive into one of the key pillars of our billion-pound strategy, which is to diversify our residential products.
We're going to talk about Harworth's net zero carbon pathway and sustainability program. Now, this is an area where we've made significant progress as a business over the last year, and we hope to bring that to life for you. Last but not least, we'll be talking about Harworth's Yorkshire and Central region. This is the largest of our three regions, and it's home to many of our mature sites, including Waverley, The AMP, and Gateway 36, all of which you'll see later today. I'm really delighted to be joined by many members of the Harworth team today. Some of them are familiar faces, some of them will be new to you. There should be plenty of time at lunch and on the site tours to speak to them.
I'll now introduce you to some of the people you're going to be hearing from alongside me during this presentation. First up, most of you will know Kitty Patmore, our CFO, who's sitting right at the back. Kitty will be joining us at the end for Q&A. We'll also shortly be hearing from James Crowe, who joined us early last year as our Director of Mixed Tenure. After that, we've got Peter Henry, whom some of you may be familiar with, as he's been with the business for over a decade, and he's now our Director of Sustainability. Last but not least, we have Ed Cathcart and Chris Davidson, who head up our Yorkshire and Central region, and will also be hosting us on the tours later this afternoon. This slide shows the agenda for today, with some approximate timings.
After the presentations, we'll hold a Q&A session with the presenters and Kitty and myself, and then we'll break for around 45 minutes for a buffet lunch, where you'll get to meet some members of our group leadership team, and then we'll jump back on the coach to do the tour of Waverley, The AMP, and onto Gateway 36. I feel like a tour guide now, but just bear with me one minute. After our tour of Gateway 36, the coach will take those of you who want to go to Doncaster Station, and we've booked return taxis for anyone else coming back to Advantage House. Before we dive into the main part of the presentation, I'd just like to spend a few moments reflecting on our operational and strategic performance.
At our full year results presentation back in March, I spoke about the uncertainty remaining in our markets for quite some time, really, this hasn't changed. Inflation is remaining stubbornly high. Interest rates look set to rise further in the near term, this is continuing to impact on growth and investor confidence in the U.K. However, the fundamentals of our markets haven't changed. You know, they're pretty much sort of as they were last year. Issues around inventory security, supply chain resilience, energy supply, and occupier and investor focus on ESG are all continuing to drive demand. The latest data suggests that vacancy rates will peak at around 7%, before falling back to below 6%, driven by the end of 2025. This is driven by both sustained demand, but also significantly less speculative building.
We're already seeing that as we're going through 2023. In some of our regions, such as the East Midlands, it's noticeably lower than this, with vacancy rates expected to peak at around 6% and fall back to 4% by 2025. This is below the long-term vacancy average. Against this backdrop, we continue to make operational progress against our strategic targets. Levels of occupier interest across our industrial and development sites remain healthy, and in recent weeks, we've seen an uptick in inquiries. In our residential portfolio, we continue to work towards exchange and completion on a number of land parcel sales to both national and regional housebuilders. As James Crowe will talk more about shortly, we're continuing to progress towards exchange on our single-family build-to-rent portfolio.
We've also made strong progress so far this year in transitioning our investment portfolio to modern Grade A, where a combination of sales and the completion of direct developments has now moved us to over a quarter of the way towards our 100% Grade A target. To finish, I just want to bring you back to a slide that many of you hopefully are now familiar with. This is our strategy scorecard. We'll put some numbers around this. Starting with direct development. Last year, we completed a record amount of direct development. Earlier this year, we completed 110,000 sq ft at Gateway 36. You'll see that this afternoon. This space continues to let well.
As we've always said, to manage risks, we will combine small to mid-sized speculative builds with pre-let and build-to-suit opportunities, and we'll flex this to respond to changing market conditions. This means really that in 2023, our level of speculative building will be lower, and we'll focus on pre-let and build-to-suit. In residential, our focus has been on accelerating sales and broadening the range of residential products, and we continue to see good progress here with 74% of our budgeted resi and industrial and logistics sales now completed, exchanged, or, and offer. This is up slightly from the figure that we reported in the full year results.
In terms of scaling up land acquisitions and promotion, we've acquired 1.1 million sq ft of industrial and logistics space so far this year. We're continuing to progress over 2,000 plots and 7 million sq ft of industrial and logistics space through the planning system. Finally, as I've already mentioned, the transition of the investment portfolio to 100% Grade A is well underway. With almost 50 million of disposals so far of older assets, we've maximized value through asset management initiatives. Importantly, they were completed in line with December 2022. Book values provide proving the strength of demand across the market. For us, a period of strong operational and strategic momentum for our long-term through the cycle businesses is sort of evidence. We remain well-positioned as we enter the second half against a challenging market backdrop.
I would reiterate that we control our land bank, we control where and when we invest, and we have a highly experienced management team who are focused on execution. We're confident our strategy is the right one, and our strong financial position, our differentiated products, and the scale and mix of our portfolio position us well to realize the full potential of our sites. With that, I'd like to hand you over to James Crowe, who's going to provide a deeper dive on our residential products. Thanks, James Crowe. Right, I'll go this way.
Well, thank you very much, Lynda, and good morning, everybody. I'm James Crowe, Harworth's Director of Mixed Tenure. I'm really excited to be able to provide a bit more information on our plans to diversify our residential products, which you'll be aware is a key component of our GBP 1 billion strategy. First, I just wanted to start with a bit of background on me and the mixed tenure team here at Harworth. I joined the business at the end of 2021. I have over 20 years' experience in the residential space, having worked as a funder, operator, developer, and consultant across multiple tenures. I was most recently head of investments and development management at ENGIE Regeneration, which I joined after its acquisition of Keepmoat Regeneration.
I've been joined in the past 18 months by two specialists in residential project management and delivery, Amardeep (Amo) Panesar and Laura Coulson. Both have joined from Partner Construction, a subsidiary of United Living. Before that, they both held roles with National Housebuilders. Our team is responsible for the delivery of mixed-tenure products across Harworth, reporting to our Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Blackshaw. Our day-to-day responsibilities involve working closely with the Harworth's existing technical and project management teams to explore and analyze mixed-tenure opportunities, identify and build potential portfolios, and taking them all the way through to fruition through the marketing and planning process, and eventually managing funding and construction partners to ensure delivery of a high-quality product. In conclusion, a very experienced in-house team. Now I'd like to show you some of what we've been working on.
This slide provides an overview of four live opportunities for our team right now, which I'll provide some more detail on over the next few slides. Many of you will be familiar with our single-family build-to-rent product, which we launched to the market in the middle of last year. This is progressing towards exchange, and I'll provide a bit more on this in a moment. Less well known to you will be our affordable homes product, which we launched to the market just last month with the issuance of an investment memorandum to interested parties. To the right, we have two opportunities that have not yet been launched, but for which we are working to identify feasibility and potential development sites.
Starting with single-family build-to-rent, we launched this portfolio last year, providing an exciting opportunity to acquire single-family build-to-rent portfolio of scale across up to 10 of our development sites in Yorkshire, the Midlands, and the Northwest. Although it's fair to say that the challenging market conditions that have taken hold in the interim have slowed our progress down, we are now well advanced in moving towards exchange with our preferred funding and delivery partners. While the contracts are being finalized, the team have been busy progressing planning applications across our selected sites. We've received our first planning permission at Riverdale Park Development in Doncaster, and we expect several others to be made over the next few months, which will allow us to begin construction during the second half of the year.
It's important to note that the single-family build-to-rent market continues to grow rapidly, with investors attracted to the defensive characteristics and potential to drive lasting positive impact for our communities. The latest data from the BPF and Savills estimates that there are over 24,500 single-family build-to-rent homes, either complete, under construction, or in planning in the U.K., compared to 18,000 just a year ago. More than a third increase in the space over 12 months. Although with just 9,500 single-family build-to-rent homes completed to date, this remains a fraction of the wider build-to-rent market, which has over 80,000 completed units and a total of 250,000 units either completed, under construction, or in planning as at Q1 2023. Turning now to our affordable homes portfolio.
To begin, I just wanted to clarify what is meant by affordable housing in this context. The National Planning Policy Framework defines affordable housing as housing for sale or rent for those whose needs are not met by the market. This includes social rent, affordable rent, as well as a range of intermediate rent and for sale products, including the shared ownership scheme. Last month, we launched an affordable homes portfolio of around 400 homes to be delivered through a forward funding arrangement. The homes will include a mix of shared ownership, affordable rented, and social rented homes designed to meet affordable family housing needs, a large and underserved sector. A large part of the portfolio is likely to be eligible for grant funding under the Government's Affordable Homes Programme, which has pledged GBP 11.5 billion to deliver 180,000 affordable homes-...
between 2021 and 2026, if economic conditions allow. This grant funding equates to approximately GBP 64,000 per home, a substantial increase from funding available under the previous government's programs, underlining the acute shortage of this type of tenure. The program places several obligations on the developer, including the need to have at least 25% of homes delivered through modern methods of construction. Leveraging our strong relationships with delivery partners, our portfolio looks set to far exceed this requirement through a combination of modular and timber framed construction. The right-hand side of this slide shows how the potential benefits to Harworth and our communities of this portfolio.
As well as us, allowing us to accelerate the delivery of our development sites, it also helps to fulfill our Section 106 obligations, in a more coordinated and integrated way than spreading this amongst the house builders on site. This type of tenure meets the demand for a range of housing needs for local people and local authority, and also adds to the demographic mix, allowing for younger and more vibrant communities with a wide range of amenities. This slide provides an overview of the portfolio. You can see from the first donut and the map on the right-hand side, that this portfolio has a good geographical spread across Yorkshire and the Midlands. Just over 40% of the total portfolio will be meeting Section 106 requirements, while the remainder is what is termed additionality. These are the homes that are eligible for grant funding.
In terms of tenure, this will ultimately be investor operator-led, but it is envisaged that just under 70% of the portfolio will be affordable rent, with a further 5% social rent. To clarify terminology here, affordable rent can be set at up to 80% of market rent, while social rent can be significantly lower and is set by a government formula based on land values. The remainder will be shared ownership, a scheme under which occupiers can part-buy their homes and rent the remainder. Their equity in the property can be increased over time. The sites highlighted blue on the right-hand side are part of the initial circa 400 home portfolio across six of our sites, with the potential for extra development at our Waverley, Ironbridge, and South East Coalville sites that could deliver around 300 further homes as part of the next phase.
What you can see from all of these sites is that they are well-established, existing communities, meaning the new homes will benefit from Harworth investments and placemaking, delivering a range of amenities and a well-designed public realm. To demonstrate this point, here is an example of where we will be delivering the affordable home product at our Thoresby Vale development, set within the Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. The site has an outline planning consent for 800 homes, plots representing 362 homes have been sold so far, with developments by David Wilson Homes and Harron Homes at the entrance to the site, which is now well established, and the first homeowners living there. The affordable homes product will be delivered in the orange area shown on the plan and spread alongside our single-family build-to-rent product.
The idea is to make the different tenures almost indistinguishable from each other, helping to create a more cohesive community. You can see from this map that the site will provide all the services and amenities that are desirable for an affordable home development, with a new local center, primary school, and employment space, all within walking distance, good transport connections, and a 350 acres country park on your doorstep. All this set within a highly desirable forest landscape. It's a similar picture across all of the sites in our portfolio, ensuring the delivery of high quality, affordable homes that really meet the needs of occupiers. That's the affordable homes portfolio, and I look forward to being able to update you further on as the year progresses.
Turning now to our net zero carbon homes product, and as I mentioned at the beginning, this is still in the planning stage. Our current proposal is to develop around 100 net zero carbon homes spread across our Waverley and Prince of Wales developments. Whilst there are an increasing number of net zero carbon developments being promoted, the industry as a whole is focusing more on net zero operational carbon emissions to align with the government's Future Homes standard, which are targeted for 2025. Harworth is focusing on whole life carbon, with an aim to meet both net zero operational carbon emissions and net zero embodied carbon emissions, in line with the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge goals. This will be achieved through highly efficient homes that generate their own renewable energy supply for the air source heat pumps through PV panels.
They'll be constructed using sustainable materials such as timber frame with lower embodied carbon, and then we will offset the remainder. Unlike with the single-family build-to-rent and affordable homes products, this proposal would mean Harworth selling directly to the market for the first time through a new consumer-facing brand. Delivery risk will be mitigated through extensive research into local markets, the use of a modular housing product, and starting with a small-scale pilot project, which will be delivered in phases. The homes will be marketed to people who care not just about where they live, but how they live. Targeted to a wide range of consumers, from those just starting out on the property ladder to retirees and families, anyone looking to live sustainably and own a home with a highly efficient design and very low running costs.
Like the other portfolios, these net zero carbon homes can help us to accelerate the delivery of our developments by offering a complementary but differentiated product from the national house builders, which will appeal to a slightly different market. It has the added benefit of allowing us to develop on awkward land parcels, which we might otherwise have to sell at a discounted rate to house builders. By undertaking this pilot, we aim to understand the infrastructure and technical requirements for delivering net zero carbon homes, as well as the end purchaser market. We think that in the longer term, modular net zero carbon homes could be part of the mix of what we deliver on our sites, and we could use it to quickly establish a market for new developments.
However, in the short term, it is our intention only to deploy this product where there is a clear strategic rationale and at a scale and pace that is appropriate to manage the associated risks. This is a growing market, and the statistics on the right-hand side show some of the drivers of this. Two-thirds of U.K. households see investment in energy-efficient homes as an attractive option to address the cost of living crisis. While a survey by Legal & General and YouGov found that buyers would be willing to pay over a 10% premium for a low-carbon property. This is why there are currently 66 multi-home net zero carbon developments currently underway in the U.K., and the number is growing rapidly. The red outline on this aerial image shows the proposed location of over 80 net zero carbon homes at Waverley.
This parcel has a steeper gradient than most of the Waverley site, being located on the Orgreave Colliery former spoil heap. It's a great example of where we may use the net zero carbon product to realize value, which may not be captured by other land users, as the table on the right-hand side shows. The traditional way we would have realized value is through a sale to a house builder, but the topography and shape of this parcel is not suited to the mainstream house builders. It may suit some smaller niche house builders, but only deliver a marginal profit on sale on that route when factoring in site servicing costs. The topography would also be a barrier to senior living due to accessibility issues.
It could be used for build-to-rent, we've already identified a parcel elsewhere at the site. Development would have to be delayed to take into account of local absorption rates. Finally, it could be used for our affordable housing product, but it has a prime aspect overlooking the Waverley Lakes, which would not necessarily be reflected in affordable housing land values. To conclude, a complementary product that can take advantage of awkward but desirable land parcels across Harworth sites, as well as providing Harworth with specialist knowledge of this growing sector of the market. It will also provide valuable technical learnings as to how we tackle the net zero embodied carbon challenge of delivering residential development ahead of the government's 2030 objectives. The final area I wanted to touch on is senior living.
We are currently exploring how to integrate senior living products, which includes everything from care homes, assisted living, and retirement homes, to a longer-term objective of delivering integrated retirement communities or an IRC. Unlike our other products, we do not have a portfolio of sites ready for deployment. Instead, we are undertaking analysis on a site-by-site basis to ascertain the best method of delivery, accounting for an area's demographics and existing supply of senior living products, as well as factors such as amenities and transport links. As you can see some, from some of the figures on the right-hand side of this slide, the potential market for this product is huge, supported by activity from institutional funders, demographic changes, and government policy. By 2030, it is estimated that one in five in the U.K. will be aged 65 or over.
Currently, only 1% of those aged 65 or over live in integrated retirement communities. This compares to 6.5% in the United States and 5.5% in Australia. If we were to get even close to the levels of adoption in these countries, we would need to build 325,000 new IRC units between now and 2030. We commissioned BNP Paribas to undertake analysis across several of our development sites to identify opportunities to add senior living products. This provides a summary of findings across four of our sites. At Waverley, they found that there was potential for a care home, assisted living, or retirement living scheme to be integrated into the wider master plan, alongside existing mixed-use elements, including our Olive Lane development, affordable housing, and build to rent.
At our Ironbridge site, where we have an existing outline planning permission for a retirement community as part of our 1,000 home master plan, we also found the potential for an IRC or a care home. The phasing of this would need to be considered, given the site is at an early stage of development, and therefore lacks some of the necessary amenities that may be required for senior living on day one. On South East Coalville, Leicestershire, we found opportunities for a mixed-tenure IRC comprising apartment and compact bungalows, as well as potential care home alongside the retail and the neighborhood center. We've already received approaches from a leading care home operator and a well-known retirement home developer for the IRC.
Finally, back at Thoresby Vale, Edwinstowe, we found potential for a mixed-tenure IRC, where senior living apartments are joining the mixed-use center to help drive density and some compact bungalows elsewhere on the surrounding area. We have lots of opportunities to progress from a senior living perspective, and our team will be working with the development management teams from across the business to identify how these can be integrated into master plans. To conclude, we're making good progress in our strategic objective of diversifying our residential products. Our single-family build-to-rent is progressing towards exchange. Our newly launched affordable homes product has received a strong level of interest so far, and our net zero carbon homes and senior living propositions are at an earlier stage, but they're well supported by favorable market dynamics, government policy, and demographic change.
Combining these tenures will significantly accelerate the development of our sites, further strengthen our placemaking capabilities, and allow us to form strong partnerships with funders, delivery partners, and local authorities. Central to our strategy success is the ability to call on extensive in-house expertise in residential development, allowing us to pursue new opportunities and manage our risk. I look forward to answering any questions you may have at the end of the presentation, but for the time being, I'll hand you over to Peter Henry, who is going to talk you through our sustainability program. Thank you.
Go on, Pete. Thanks, James Crowe. Good morning, all. Thanks, Linda, for reminding me I've been here for a decade, and I probably had a full head of hair when I started, so all good. My name is Pete Henry, and I'm Harworth's Director of Sustainability. I'm pleased to be able to speak with you today about the great progress that we're making on embedding sustainability and our sustainability program into the Harworth Way through our culture, strategy, and operations, including through our recently published Net Zero Carbon Pathway. Also, try and touch on a few examples of how our understanding is evolving and being incorporated directly into our developments, which is very important for us. Before I go into the detail, I just wanted to spend a few moments talking about our sustainability team, and where we fit into Harworth.
The Harworth Way has existed for some years now, and I was appointed as our first Director of Sustainability, roughly a year ago now. While this is a change of role for me, I think it's fair to say that it's really just an evolution of the roles I've undertaken, both within Harworth since 2012, and prior to that, acting as a consultant on large-scale regeneration projects across the UK. I joined the business in 2012 and held a number of key roles in the delivery of commercial, residential, and energy developments. Before lately, being appointed as the Regional Director for Yorkshire and Central on that region's creation in 2019.
In this role, I was responsible for some of Harworth's largest regeneration projects over the best part of a decade, taking them from acquisition to delivery, including Waverley, the AMP, and Gateway 36, which we'll be seeing later today. Look, in this role, I was responsible for helping to develop some of our key driving principles for sustainable regeneration, some deliberately, some by accident. When the opportunity came last year, and Lynda and I spoke about taking on a full-time sustainability role, it felt really natural, a good natural fit for me. In the structure we've created, Harworth Board has overall responsibility for setting the principles of the Harworth Way, and in 2021, we established a board ESG committee.
Lynda has executive responsibility for the direction of the Harworth Way, creating a rigorous but flexible governance process to manage our approach to ESG. I report to Lynda, and I also attend the board ESG committee meetings, as well as being a member of our investment committee. Being a part of these committees ensures a cohesive ESG thread runs right through all of our business-making decisions. Over the past year, we've been building a sustainability team within Harworth, as you can see here on the right-hand side of the slide. Jane Thompson has been with- us for a number of years working on our grant funding applications. Her role has really naturally evolved alongside the government agendas on net zero carbon and social value to support our work and link into government at all levels.
We've appointed Owain Roper , who joined us last year as our Sustainability Analytics Manager. Owain is initially leading on the creation of our carbon accounting system and will then move into elements of the business. He has extensive experience in data analytics and reporting from previous roles. Just to recap on the Harworth Way, which has handily appeared on screen behind me. It's our framework for integrating sustainability and social value into our business, and more importantly, the developments we create. It ensures sustainability principles are embedded across our culture, strategy, and perhaps most importantly, our approach to development from concept right through to completion. It's a continually evolving framework. It should be responsive to the ever-changing needs of the environment and the communities within which we work, and though also those which we work alongside.
It guides our strategy and how we create the sustainable places where people want to live and work. Our approach recognizes that we cannot deliver our developments in isolation. Working with all our stakeholders at all stages of the process is absolutely fundamental to us achieving our aims. During 2022, we commenced a full review and expansion of the model to reflect both the key drivers outlined in our growth strategy, but also our wider sustainability commitments. The high-level outcomes are indicated on this slide. The Harworth Way has three impact pillars: planet, communities, and people. Each of these comprise six focus impact areas, representing the key drivers for us as a business and for delivering each pillar. Each focus impact area is continually reviewed throughout the business and divided further into building blocks.
These building blocks really are the key work streams to be undertaken within the business to deliver a set of outputs, that are then, in reality, the tangible outcomes that drive sustainability through our developments. The interaction between these different elements is illustrated by our interlocking model, hand- drawn on the left-hand side here. As mentioned, the focus impact areas and building blocks will evolve over time. What you see in front of you now will not be the same as this is in years years' time. It reflects our progress and priorities through the Harworth Way. Over the next two, few slides, I'm just going to dig a little bit deeper into each of the pillars. And what we're hoping to achieve in 2023 and beyond. Starting with the planet pillar.
Our planet pillar is focused on understanding and reducing our environmental impact, while also promoting climate resilience and biodiversity through our development and regeneration activities. The application of this approach comes from initial concept to our role in long-term stewardship, and allows us to integrate sustainability at all phases of development. That's really crucial. We're trying to align our recent net zero carbon pathway commitments in the design for our master plans, and how we deliver both our infrastructure master plans and the individual buildings within them. It's a real relationship between those two things. Driving improvements in building efficiency and increasing integration of renewable energy into our developments is crucial.
We're going to continue to promote innovation by using circular economy principles in our role as a master developer, something that's close to my heart as a civil engineer, and with an emphasis on maximizing the recycling materials, minimizing the reuse of raw materials, and delivering the correct infrastructure for our customers. We've made really good progress on this pillar in 2022, with highlights including devising and issuing our initial net zero carbon pathway, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute. Developing new commercial building specification to meet EPC A and net zero carbon and operation ready status. Incorporating the integration of renewable energy via rooftop solar, and delivering our first net zero carbon in construction development at Bardon Hill.
Alongside this, we're offering green leases to all of our new commercial occupiers and ensuring that all our remediation contracts continue to stipulate the reuse of materials on-site, and recycling of materials off-site as a priority. Really, it's just in accordance with good waste management practice, as well as instigating our first biodiversity net gain scheme at Gateway 36, which you'll see in a couple of hours' time in partnership with the local council. Our commitments for 2023 are shown on the right-hand side of the slide here.
I'm not going to go through them in detail. All of these are allowing us to build towards our overall goals in terms of sustainability. The focus for us is on further enhancing our data collection and reporting capabilities, particularly around our Scope three emissions this year, which many of you will be aware, account for by far the largest proportion of our wider emissions. They're also the most difficult to capture. We're going to require a full understanding of both our upstream and our downstream emissions through our development processes, also then through our occupiers and the impact we have on those purchasing our service land and buildings. Within our report, if you've had a chance to read, you'll see reference to Scope four.
Turning into the communities pillar, which is all about creating, strengthening, and supporting communities through our regeneration development processes, both today and in the future. As a master developer, we create communities through our new developments, and we look to enhance existing local communities in the regions within which we work. Our developments create economic benefit through their regenerative effects at both a local and regional level, supporting jobs, housing, and investment. We also have a long track record of delivering social value through the regeneration we've undertaken in integrating homes, amenities, and natures within a single community, and it's long been a driver of our master plans. Our developments also promote healthier lifestyles and look to integrate sustainable transport wherever possible. We made good progress again in 2022.
We developed over 430,000 sq ft of employment space to support local jobs, progressed plans for new amenities, including schools, cycle infrastructure, a hotel, which you can see peeking out of the window over here, a healthcare facility, we've also got advanced plans to bring integrated travel plans to several of our new developments, building on the improvement of connectivity and encouraging greener lifestyles. At year-end, our total portfolio had the potential to support roughly 73,000 jobs, deliver a GVA of about 4.6 billion, generate over 82 million in business rates, roughly 56 million in council tax receipts. We also held an opening ceremony at our 50-acre Coronation Park, our Cadley Park development in Swadlincote.
We worked in really close partnership over a number of years with South Derbyshire Council, the National Forest, the RSPB, Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, and a lot of the local communities. All of that really underscores the range of transformation impact that Harworth sites can have on our communities. As you can see from the right-hand side of the slide, we've got a range of wider commitments that we're working through for 2023, it's going to be a busy year, to ensure these economic and social benefits are advanced for our communities and the surrounding communities through the implementation of a social value assessment process that should cover all areas of the communities pillar. It's going to be a complex process, but it's something that we're really pushing through. The last, but by certainly no means least, is our people pillar.
We aim to be an employer of choice, creating an inclusive, diverse, and empowered workplace culture in which our people can develop and realize their full potential. Central to this is the prioritization of employee health and wellbeing, ensuring our people remain recognized and engaged. We've embedded a One Harworth culture throughout our business for a number of years, this really underlines our collaborative approach to delivering and managing our sites, and they're succeeding as a team, hopefully. The outputs from the people pillar are largely the work of Harworth's Human Resources and Transformation team , headed by Kate Morris-Bates, who will be joining us later today, as well as our Risk and Compliance team for areas such as health and safety.
The team has had a really active year again, delivering our first company-wide EDI training and taking our first cohort of staff through a leadership development program, including the two guys in the sustainability team. We've extended our participation in our restricted share plans so that over half of our team were granted an award this year. We've successfully onboarded 13 new colleagues. We've launched a menopause policy, and we've ensured that there were no RIDDOR reportable accidents by either Harworth personnel or contractors working on our behalf, despite the increased workload.
Again, as you can see from the right-hand side, we've got a really good set of ambitious programs this year that we're pursuing, from the launch of the Harworth Academy, an umbrella for a range of structured learning and development programs for our people, to the refurbishment of the office that you're currently sat in, does need it a little bit, to make it a more inspiring workplace that is fit for modern ways of working. Look, that was a little whistle-stop tour of the Harworth Way and our plans for 2023. I'd like to just take a little bit of time now to go through what is arguably our biggest ESG project over the past 12 months. It's kept me occupied, which was producing our net zero carbon pathway. A bit of background.
You'll be aware that the U.K. government has committed to be net zero carbon by 2050, an ambitious target that they're working through. To help visualize this, these charts on the slide here are extracts from the Climate Change Committee, a statutory body that was established to advise the U.K. and its devolved governments on meeting those emissions targets, also to report to Parliament on the progress being made. You do not need to really see the detail of the charts, the charts indicate the potential pathways for the U.K. to meet its 2050 goal. The middle chart shows the predicted sources of abatement for achieving net zero carbon for buildings. What is immediately clear, again, you do not need to see the detail, is how much this relies on residential buildings and the use of residential buildings.
That's represented by the purple, green, and blue on the slides to give you a feel for the scale. The chart on the right then shows you the types of abatement required for the UK to reach its 2050 goals. The largest share of this is in the orange element, which is the electrification, in its broadest sense, for vehicles, manufacturing, heating. It's really a big move to electrification that we have to consider as a business. The light blue segment is the production of low carbon energy, and the green segment, interestingly, is the government's estimate of the amount of offset emissions and/or carbon capture through sequestration and other means to remove greenhouse gases. It's a really interesting little thing that affects us as a company. As a construction and property. Sorry, excuse me.
Because construction and property are some of the largest sources of emissions, a significant amount of our effort is being made to develop consistent real estate industry standards and protocols. It really is an emerging market, an emerging set of guidance. The guidance that's coming through is based on overarching principles. This simplification model here covers the full life cycle of a project, from funding and planning, construction, through to occupation and reuse. This really covers what happens with a building. We're working very strongly on what happens with our overall master plans. All of these elements are being considered as part of our net zero carbon pathway work, but they're too numerous to go into today. Happy to have a chat on the bus tour if anybody wants to go into it, but I'm just going to highlight a key couple of areas.
Alongside the government and industry commitments, the rate and scale of regulation and standard changes that we're navigating is pretty significant. These are not just stipulated by government, but also coming through industry bodies and increasingly local authorities, particularly in a planning context. You can also see our net zero carbon pathway aims to achieve these standards well in advance of them becoming mandatory. This will allow us to look to mitigate our risks and ensure the resilience and breach-proofing of our assets and also our developments. Turning to Harworth's net zero carbon model. Across the top of this side, we've demonstrated that the net zero carbon pathway fits into the Harworth Way model, acting as one of the really key focus impact areas of the planet pillar. Across the bottom is our ethos in relation to approaching the net zero carbon pathway.
These are our guiding principles for everything we do as a team. It's about accepting that we can't do everything immediately. Being flexible and being authentic is really what's needed. As we've said in the bottom right-hand side of the slide, we always remember that we're here to create places that we'd be proud to return to alongside the next generation. Actually, I guess maybe I'll be doing that with some of you who haven't been here for so long now, a little bit later today. Look, clearly, there's a lot of detail on these slides, but essentially, it shows the five core commitments of our net zero carbon pathway. Commitment 1, our 2030 target to be net zero carbon for our current operational boundary of emissions for Scope one, two, and select to Scope three emissions by 2030.
Our 2040 target to be net zero carbon for Scope one, two, and all of our Scope three emissions by 2040. Our commercial development target, that all our new developments, commercial developments, will be net zero carbon in construction and operation by 2030, so 6 and a half years away, roughly. Our master developer target, to implement a master developer whole life carbon assessment process, also to review our targets for our residential developments by 2025. The guys will tell you that that's the one that keeps me awake at night, and I really want to get through. Finally, our commercial building target, which is also one of our four growth drivers of our strategy, as Lynda articulated earlier, to create 100% of our investment portfolio to be Grade A by 2027. Moving on, our current operational boundary.
This is a Sankey diagram, in case people haven't come across these before. They're very interesting. Our current emissions in 2022 were reduced by 10.6%, roughly, from 2021. We've really recognized the need to both continue our progress and to be really specific in our net zero carbon pathway. We report our greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption in compliance with the requirements of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting regulations, or SECR. The emissions data in the Sankey diagram on this page opposite reflects our financial year to date to the 31st of December, 2022. We use the operational control boundary methods to calculate our greenhouse gas emissions, and we report on all sources of environmental impact for areas over which we have control.
You can see from the diagram that the majority of our Scope one emissions come from fuel used in material reuse and recycling, such as our PfR operations at Ironbridge and our development sites. It also comes from natural gas uses in our offices, including this office. The majority of our Scope two emissions come from electricity used in our managed assets, and that our Scope three emissions that we are currently measuring largely relate to business travel, waste disposal, and the impact of homework. On the right-hand side of the next slide, you'll see how we're working towards reducing these emissions by 2030 in a tangible fashion. We're looking at a combination of energy efficiency measures, on-site renewable energy generation, and the sequestration of any remaining emissions.
You can see that the sequestration is only likely to take place in the final years, as we hope to maximize reduction through other measures first, and happy to talk about that in a bit of detail later today. Our business model details the steps to growth across the master development lifecycle. To guide our future reporting boundaries, we've developed a master developer emissions model, which really highlights where our emissions occur against our business model. Really important for us to integrate that within what we're doing. Our proposed carbon accounting system will reflect the stages highlighted in the flowchart, and will provide us with a real range of data to help manage our progress across each of the development stages. In 2023, we're looking to report on our greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption beyond that required for SECR compliance.
We're looking at providing the basis of comprehensive emissions inventory for our Scope three emissions. We're going to build on that year-on-year. Where we don't fully understand elements of our emissions, we're going to be transparent. We're going to use that information that we gather to work with our suppliers and our occupiers at the other end of the scale and the wider industry. That we can all meet the challenges of meeting our net zero carbon commitments, both in the short and long term. The Sankey diagram on this side provides an illustration of the scale, relativity, and relationship of our emissions across the business in any given year as we move towards implementing our strategic plan.
Whilst in 2022, we didn't set a baseline for our emissions, we're confident that the work we're undertaking on the integration of our emissions pathway with our business model will provide us with a really sound basis on which to report our wider emissions from 2023 onwards, also to set a detailed associated net zero carbon pathway for our Scope 3 emissions in line with our new report at the end of this year. The next figure illustrates and maps our proposals to decrease and mitigate our emissions to meet our 2040 net zero carbon commitment.
The indicative measures on the right-hand side here are to reduce our emissions. It gives an indication of the timing of the implementation, but also the split between what we need to do with our occupiers and what we need to do with our construction and development projects. We'll continue to develop our understanding of these measures alongside our Scope three carbon reporting in 2023 to guide our pathway. Finally, before I hand over to Chris and Ed, just wanted to bring to life some of pretty staid stuff that I've gone through here in terms of diagrams and photos of what we've done on a few real-life case studies, to give you a feel of what's actually going on. We can start where we're stood, at Advantage House.
As you'll see from the on the diagram here, this building accounts for a sizable chunk of our overall Scope one and two emissions. We've taken an integrated approach to reducing our Scope one and two emissions so far at Advantage House. When you go outside, you'll be able to see, hopefully. In early 2022, we installed roughly 400 square meters of rooftop solar PV, in a coordinated approach to reducing our electricity usage and also increasing our renewable energy usage. We have 1 pool car, fully electric, and at the end of 2021, we had 4 EV charging points. We've now added a further 6 EV charging points in 2022, and all of them are free to use for our staff.
In addition, we've introduced a salary sacrifice scheme, which is exclusively for electric and low emissions vehicles. Implementing these measures has provided us with a coordinated approach to our emissions reduction on a very localized basis that meant that we had a 22% year-on-year reduction in our electricity use from the grid, a 32% year-on-year reduction in electricity use related to emissions from Advantage House, the equivalent of roughly 38,000 miles of charge from the EV charging points we've put in, which directly impacts on our employee emissions from their travel. The next step in the process of reducing our emissions for our head office is a proposed refurbishment of the entire office with a sustainable brief at the heart of the proposals that incorporates flexible working arrangements that will drive further emissions reductions.
We'll also be seeking to reduce our Scope one through a comprehensive review of the existing gas heating system. It is getting a little warm in here, isn't it? Also to look to create a modern, sustainable workplace for our employees. The next example we're going later today is Gateway 36 in Barnsley. Look, in developing this site, we've worked with our construction partners to create an integrated, sustainable, new commercial development. We've delivered it in phases through innovative earthworks treatments. Our approach has minimized material use, reduced the need for emissions-intensive foundation solutions, reduced material import and export, and it's also maximized the use of circular economy principles across all of the phases of the site. We'll talk about that in a little bit of detail this afternoon.
The individual buildings incorporate energy efficiency, on-site energy provision, and net zero carbon measures in line with the work we undertook on our commercial build spec during 2022. It includes being EPC A-rated, BREEAM very good and excellent, roof-mounted solar PV to meet the office energy requirements, with the opportunity to increase the provision for specific occupiers on each building, LED lighting, electricity-based heating, so no gas, variable refrigerant flow systems featuring simultaneous heating and cooling, as well as heat recovery capabilities. Don't ask me about that one. Rainwater harvesting, water leak detection systems, which reduce water usage and also emissions at source. The whole site is incorporated in a sustainable urban drainage system, which manages the quality and quantity of surface water runoff, while also reducing embodied carbon emissions through the construction process and during the delivery of infrastructure.
At Gateway 36 as well, just slightly off the photo, and in coordination with the local council, we've actually committed to delivering a minimum of 10% biodiversity net gain. That's in advance of the requirements being mandated by the Environment Act that's forthcoming. We've been able to deliver this requirement both on-site and off-site on adjacent land we own, which was the former Barrow Colliery. We were able to identify roughly 13 acres of land that will benefit from significant long-term enhancement. The enhancements include new ponds, wet woodlands, as well as work to enhance existing neutral grasslands and mixed scrub, improving the overall condition of the area.
Look, bringing in these measures has brought a lot of biodiversity benefits, and the site's been subsequently identified as a site of special scientific interest, which is a real boon for us, actually, in terms of the work we're doing. Onwards to Pheasant Hill Park, Rossington, as I know it. Brownfield remediation is, despite its much wider sustainability benefits, and can be an emissions-intensive activity, but using circular economy principles embedded into our design process for the remediation with a no material in, no material out starting point. At Pheasant Hill Park, we were creating, or we are creating, a community of up to 1,200 new homes with extensive nature recovery from the spoil heap of the former Rossington Colliery.
Our circular economy approach has minimized emissions at the site by reusing roughly 99% of the material, which equates to about 1.7 million cubic materials and material within the development. We've used material from the site for the creation of the Great Yorkshire Way, in partnership with Doncaster Council. We've reused roughly 50,000 cubic meters of peat as part of the landscaping on the site to capture and store emissions, and we're naturalizing the former colliery spoil heap by reusing over 3,000 tons of sewage cake and other bioadditives for soil making in the country park. As part of the process, we've also removed all of the old concrete structures that were all recycled back into the works, and we've saved on the import of natural aggregate, reducing road traffic and the use of natural quarry stone reserves.
On top of that, we've reused initially unusable materials on a phased basis, so we've taken materials from the first phase into the second phase of remediation into the third phase, and we've dried and reprocessed them. Sounds a little bit technical, but actually it's a really useful product in terms of what we're doing. The final example is our Ironbridge site, where we've taken some pretty early active decisions, actually, to reduce whole life carbon emissions, which have influenced both our delivery and our stakeholders, and in particular, our house building partners. In 2021, we secured planning for the regeneration of the former Ironbridge Power Station, as many of you will know, into a 1,000 home mixed-use new development, just a few minutes from the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site.
The vision of Benthall Grange, as the site has become known, is to restore the landscape back to a green, thriving residential community after about 90 years of industrialization. The development looks to create an inclusive and sustainable location that integrates with its diverse historical roots, trying to recognize the rich heritage of the site and also the landscaping surrounding the site. As a wider sort of point, the use of gas heating in homes accounts for roughly 15%-20% of emissions within the UK. Replacing those gas heating systems is an integral part of the graphs you saw earlier in terms of the UK's net zero carbon pathway. The provision of infrastructure to achieve these aims is a key element of what we do as a company in terms of our master developer role.
A key part of our role is the provision of that infrastructure to serve the house builder customers. The decisions we take at an early stage of a project have really long-term consequential impacts for both our customers and the future of the communities we create. Harworth took the early decision that energy-reducing design and renewable energy would be incorporated from the start to reduce long-term emissions. We also took the decision that by understanding and working with our house builder customers, seeing what was going on in the market, that we could influence the long-term emissions from the site by not providing gas infrastructure for heating. It's quite a big decision for us to take, but that one decision ensures that efficient and entirely electrically powered heating, in line with the U.K. government's aims, will be used for all the buildings across the development.
It'll enable our housebuilder customers to address their operational emissions from the outset, and it really shows how the master developer process works in terms of emissions reduction. To support this, you can also see from the next slide, a bit of a techie slide, I suspect, or not, that we've installed two very large new power transformers. You'll have seen in the news, the connection to the grid has been a bit of an issue, but those power transformers have upgraded the power capacities of the site to suit the electric heating, and to give us a really sound basis on which to do that development. That kind of concludes my piece on the Harworth Way.
Hope you found it a little bit informative, and I'll be on hand to answer any questions you might have at the end of the presentation or indeed on the tour later. In the meantime, I'll hand you over to Ed and Chris to give you a bit of a chat through the Yorkshire and Central portfolio. Cheers! Thank you very much, Pete. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Ed Cuttell
The sites in these regions, in this region range from mature major projects, which we've spent years delivering, to new acquisitions of currently unconsented brownfield land. As you can see from this slide. We have over 4,000 homes which have either been constructed or are under construction and over 5,500 jobs which have been supported, generating GBP 390 million of gross value added for the region. What is still to come in our pipeline is more significant still, with the potential to deliver almost 15,000 housing plots, with over a quarter of these already consented, and 16 million sq ft of industrial and logistics space, with the potential to generate GBP 2 billion of gross value added to the Yorkshire economy and surrounding areas.
Before we talk more about the sites we're going to be seeing today, we just wanted to provide a quick update on three key developments, which are ones to watch as the next year is likely to prove a busy period for them. These are Skelton Grange and Gascoigne Wood, close to Leeds, and Thoresby Vale in the heart of the Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. Starting with Skelton Grange. Skelton Grange is a 50-acre site adjacent to junction 45 of the M1 to the southeast of Leeds City Centre. The site was formerly the location of the Skelton Grange Power Station and was acquired by Harworth in 2014, with remediation and enabling works commencing shortly thereafter.
In April 2020, Harworth sold 19.5 acres of land at the site to enfinium for the development of an energy from waste facility, which is currently under construction and expected to be operational in late 2023. In August 2021, further plans were approved for the development of a 99 MW battery storage facility on a 5.4-acre parcel on the site. In late 2021, we submitted a planning application for the development of up to 800,000 sq ft of industrial and logistics space across up to five units, ranging in size from 126,000 sq ft to 202,000 sq ft. Alongside infrastructure upgrades, the plans include a segregated cycle and pedestrian path that is proposed to connect to the TransPennine Trail and Sustrans Route 67, as well as tree planting, hedge planting, and other ecological enhancements.
Gascoigne Wood is a 185-acre former colliery site in Sherburn in Elmet, North Yorkshire, and not far from Leeds. The site benefits from an existing rail connection through the Sherburn Rail Freight Interchange, and also lies in close proximity to the A1M and the M62. In 2021, Network Rail began using part of the site as a logistics hub to support the TransPennine Route upgrade project. Harworth's plans for the site would see the development of up to 2 million sq ft of rail-linked industrial and logistics space, as you can see from this CGI on screen now. Thoresby Colliery was Nottinghamshire's last operational coal mine, and its closure in 2015 ended a 750-year history of mining in the county.
Just a few years later, in 2019, Harworth received planning permission to transform the site into a sustainable new community, comprising 800 new homes, a retirement village, and up to 250,000 sq ft of commercial space, which expected to create around 1,000 jobs. The plans will also see the restoration of the site's former spoil heap, which can be seen at the top of the image on the slide, to create a 350-acre country park with multiple ecological habitats and significant areas of green infrastructure. At its peak, the park will offer the highest vantage point for miles around and offering panoramic views of Sherwood Forest. Harworth completed demolition, clearance, and remediation works in 2018, which including permanently filling and capping the two mine shafts.
We have since sold service plots to Harron Homes and Barratt and David Wilson Homes to develop units on the site. As you can see from the image on this slide, you can see home construction is well underway. A new primary school will also be constructed at the site, incorporating a forest school ethos, which aims to connect students with the outside world as far as possible. The school design will be future-proofed through the inclusion of a number of energy-saving features, including mechanical-free ventilation and roof-mounted solar PV panels. We received planning permission for the school last month. Enabling works are already underway, as can be seen on the far left of this image.
The colliery's original workshop has also been retained as a heritage asset and will soon be refurbished to accommodate a range of community and leisure uses as part of a new local center. We're really excited about the progress being made at Thoresby, and you can expect to hear more from us about this next phase of plot sales at the site and the school in the next few months. That rounds off a collection of sites that you are not going to see today, but which we are looking forward to showing you around at some point in the near future. Now I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Chris, to set the scene for the sites that you are going to see today, starting with the one that we are speaking at right now, which is Waverley and the AMP.
Thank you, Ed. Good morning, good morning, everybody. Like Pete, I've also been here, nearly a decade. Not bald yet, but as my wife keeps telling me, getting there fast, so Right. Waverley and the AMP, what would I say? We're going to see the site very shortly, but an enormous source of pride for everybody working at Harworth. It's our largest, it's our most mature site, and its journey from coal mine and coking works to the site we're going to see today, has been a remarkable one, actually. Extraordinary. The site was once the Orgreave Colliery and coking works, where coal mining and coking operations were conducted for over 150 years.
Orgreave was perhaps most famous or infamous for the Battle of Orgreave in 1984. Most of you will remember that one of the flashpoints of the miners' strikes. The colliery closed in 1981. There was also the coking plant, which supplied coke to the steel factories of Scunthorpe, and this finally closed in 1990 with a loss of approximately 500 jobs. In 1995, British Coal Opencast began restoring the site's tip to make part of the land fit for rebuilding. The remediation process was extremely challenging, taking a decade to remove all of the coal from the site and only reaching completion around 2011.
In 2002, outline planning consent was granted for the AMP, the AMP combines a research institution, training, and graduates from the University of Sheffield and private sector firms. The origins of the AMP lie with the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre, or AMRC, which itself is a joint intervention between the University of Sheffield and Boeing, and occupied the first buildings on the site when they were completed in 2004. Since then, the AMP has grown significantly. In 2008, Rolls-Royce opened its Factory of the Future at the site, including workshop, lab, office, and conference space. In 2013, which is when I joined, ironically, Rolls-Royce bought land to build a 215,000 sq ft blade casting facility. Lots of dates here. Sorry about this.
Hopefully, you remember them all. In 2017, McLaren Automotive took a 20-year lease on a new carbon fiber tube manufacturing facility. In 2021, the UK Atomic Energy Authority moved into a new building at the site, taking a 20-year lease. In 2008, planning was submitted for a new community of almost 4,000 homes at the site. This was approved in 2011. The first house was occupied at the site just before 2012. Since then, we've sold land for over 2,400 homes to a range of national and regional house builders, including Taylor Wimpey, Barratt, Harron Homes, and Avant.
From the start, we were committed to making Waverley a great place to live, ensuring plentiful of green space, a range of on-site amenities, which we'll talk to you about when we go around on the coach, and a bespoke design code, which was fundamental actually, to making sure that we did achieve that sense of place, and belonging, and making sure that the housebuilders had something, you know, to abide to effectively to create the place. In this vein, the site now includes a primary school, a Waverley Junior Academy , a family pub, a community garden, several playgrounds, and 300 acres of green space set around two very large lakes.
There's also a four-star hotel being built just across the road. We'll soon be breaking ground on Olive Lane, which is a new mixed-use heart of the community that's going to provide shops, cafes, medical center, and office space. I'll touch on some of this in the detail very shortly, but a very exciting scheme for Harworth. Here are just a few images that show the scale of that transformation. The left-hand image shows the Orgreave site as it looked in the late 1980s, just before its closure. The right-hand image shows the site around 2011, before the first residential development took place, but with some of the AMRC buildings already in situ. This is an image of the site, taken just two weeks ago.
You can see the amount of development that has taken place, both on the AMP and on the residential area in the distance over the space of just 10 years. There's still a lot of work to do, and this is what we hope it looks like by 2027. We've marked on here some of the key developments between now and that date, which we'll talk to you about shortly when we get on the bus. They include Olive Lane, which I've just mentioned, and Highfield Park , which I'll come on to talk about next.
They also include further residential development in the Waverley Waterfront area and our net zero carbon homes pilot that James Crowe has talked about, as well as a mix of land sales, small-scale speculative development and build-to-suit opportunities as part of the next phase of the AMP. We've also entered into active discussions about bringing a train station to Waverley on the existing line running across the site boundary, which is the bottom of the image here, which is the Sheffield to Lincoln line. The Waverley scheme was included in the government's National Infrastructure Strategy, published alongside spending review announcements in November 2020. We're now working with the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority to develop a business case to support a new station, which is really important for the site.
This new infrastructure would be transformational for the area, allowing even easier commuting into and out of the development, with good accessibility to Olive Lane and other amenities on the site. That brings me on to Olive Lane, which is something I've been working on for the last couple of years personally. This is roughly what the site looks like today. It's 10 acres. It'll shortly be transformed into a new heart of the community scheme, designed to join together the advanced manufacturing park to the north of the development and the residential development to the south, through high-quality commercial, community, and residential uses.
The center will effectively support Waverley's strengthening, flourishing resident population, which currently numbers over 2,500 people, in addition to approximately 2,000 workers in the Advanced Manufacturing Park. Olive Lane's a scheme we've been aiming to bring forward for several years now. The original scheme was envisaged before COVID, and it was very retail-heavy. The delays caused by COVID and its impact on the retail environment, as well as considerations about the impact of traffic and other factors on the local area, have led us effectively to revisit the design for the scheme.
A public consultation for the revised scheme, which is more convenience and community-focused and has a greater degree of residential development, is currently progressing through public consultation, with a detailed planning application due to be submitted imminently, actually. We really do strongly believe that the new scheme, which is smaller, is going to be much more sustainable and appropriate for Waverley. A planning application for the medical center, actually, which is at the southern end of the Olive Lane scheme, has already got the benefit of a planning permission. We've got a contractor lined up, and this facility is about to commence shortly in the next few months. This is an artist's impression of Olive Lane.
Just to orientate you've got the residential area at the bottom of the picture and the AMP slightly uphill at the top. You can see that the scheme will be focused around a high street on the eastern side, or the right of that picture, with a medical center closest to the residential area at the bottom, and commercial units forming the street, leading up to stairs to the north or top of the picture, which will then connect into the AMP. At the center of the scheme, you can just see the blue line going to that. We'll have a convenience store, which we're already in discussions with a local retailer, no, sorry, a national retailer.
The remaining space to the west of the local center will be a mixture of slightly higher density residential and townhouses, and you'll see the quality and design of that type of product when we get out there on the bus. We feel that whole scheme is going to be very vibrant and the quality of the architecture is going to be fantastic. This is an artist's impression of the high street, looking down from the steps from the AMP towards the Waverley residential area. Note that the buildings have been designed to gradually transition from the materials used in the Advanced Manufacturing Park, such as corrugated cladding, through to much more brickwork as we head towards the houses towards the bottom.
These are some artist's impressions of what the street might look like in the evening, with a range of shops, cafes, and restaurants available. Finally, this is a view from the bottom of the high street, from the residential end, looking north. Again, you can see the greater use of brickwork and timber to tie in with the housing, reflect the residential area. Then in the foreground here, you can see that's the medical center, which will be developed by a specialist in partnership with the local council, and clinical commissioning group. Finally, another really exciting piece of work that we're about to embark on this year is what we call Highfield Park. This is key infrastructure that will shortly be commencing at Waverley.
It's about 1.5 km of green space, called Highfield Park. The park will connect the AMP, through the housing, right the way down to the Waverley Lakes via Olive Lane and will comprise four distinct areas. Number one, an area of tree planting with play areas. Number two, a main area of play and activity, including a British Cycling funded bike track and outside gym equipment. Number three, wetlands. Finally, open grasslands used for games and other recreational purposes. That's Highfield Park, and we look forward to showing you where that's going to be after lunch. I mean, it looks very small on there, but it's a huge, vast stretch of land. The next site that we will be visiting this afternoon will be Gateway 36 in Barnsley.
Gateway 36 is a site that actually I've been involved with for about 10 years now. It's a 127 acre site. It's formerly home to the Rockingham Colliery. It benefits from its adjacency to junction 36 of the M1, fantastic location, and direct frontage onto the Dearne Valley Parkway in Barnsley, providing direct links to Leeds, Sheffield, and Doncaster. The development received GBP 3.1 million of funding from Sheffield City Region, which we've spent on the infrastructure works at the site. In 2015, we received outline planning permission for phase one, which comprises about 145,000 sq ft of space, with units let to occupiers, including the Environment Agency, Talurit, ESCO and Car Supermarket, and a number of small fast food outlets, too.
In summer 2019, Harworth sold the commercial units on phase one to Mayfair Capital to fund new acquisition opportunities across the business. In December 2021, we sold a 24-acre plot at the site, representing phase three of the development, to Firethorn for GBP 11.6 million. Firethorn , as you'll see later, are now on site constructing a 340,000 sq ft logistics facility.
Earlier this year, we, Harworth, completed the development of 110 thousand sq ft of Grade A industrial and logistics space at the site across three units, which are sort of bottom left of that picture, representing the initial stage of what we call phase two. These units were Harworth's commercial building spec that Pete mentioned earlier, achieving a rating of BREEAM Very Good, and then benefiting from the installation of solar PV panels, with the ability for occupiers to increase this to full roof coverage.
The wider scheme includes 20 EV charging points, rainwater harvesting, and a sustainable heating and cooling system, as well as a building envelope design that is sympathetic to the surrounding environment, which you'll see when you go up there later, from the colors of the cladding and the design of the buildings, which are effectively set on a large hillside. Planning has also been submitted for a 139,000 sq ft unit at the site as part of the next, part of Phase two, which Harworth intends to pre-let, before construction begins, and you'll see that with. That's the top building on the top left of the picture there. This is what the site looked like a few months ago.
We recently completed the letting of a 39,000 sq ft unit as part of that first phase of the second phase of development, if you like. That unit's been let on a 10-year lease to a lifestyle fashion brand, Lucy & Yak, and will be used for warehousing and distribution, and we should be able to get you in to have a look at that later. You can also see on this slide the construction underway of the Firethorn unit, which is to the right of the main road here, just in the middle there. Sorry, just towards the top of the screen. Lots to see at this site when we get there this afternoon. I really look forward to taking you around and showing you some of the units.
That brings me to the end now. I'm going to now hand you back to Lynda, who will make a few closing comments. Thank you.
Thanks, Chris. We've been busy, I think. I think the one thing when you look at these pictures on the screen, and you get on the sites, the pictures make them look a lot smaller than they actually are. These sites are enormous. I'd like to thank my colleagues, for the presentations and for taking us through the material that they have so far. I think we've covered a lot, and I'd like to open before we open up to Q&A, I'd like to just conclude with a few final points. Just to really reinforce the fact, I mean, what you've seen my colleagues present shows that we are a long-term, through-the-cycle business. These schemes don't happen by magic, and they don't happen in one or two years. They take decades.
We've made some really strong strategic and operational sort of progress so far in 2023, against a more challenging market backdrop than maybe we saw, you know, 18 months ago. We're also delivering against all four drivers of our billion-pound growth strategy. As James Crowe has covered, diversifying our residential products will be a key component of that strategy. The market dynamics for these products remains favorable, and they will help us to accelerate development, add to placemaking, and grow our strategic partnerships. As Pete's covered, massive amount of work in this space over the last sort of 12 months, the Harworth Way will be our guiding framework as we execute our strategy, ensuring that we make a positive, lasting impact for our communities, the planet, and our people.
The developments you'll see today, as well as those that have been brought to life across Yorkshire and central, and the rest of our portfolio, are really exemplars of the Harworth Way in action. Our focus markets are drivers of economic growth, and they continue to have really robust fundamentals. Moreover, in an economy in need of planning reform that truly drives growth there, I've not got off that bandwagon yet and won't stop, there remains an acute shortage of high-quality consented land. We control our land bank, we control where and when we invest, and we have a highly experienced management team who focus on execution. As we navigate the business through the challenges of the wider economic backdrop, we're confident that the strategy is the right one to deliver long-term value to stakeholders while meeting our net zero carbon commitments.
Our strong financial position, our differentiated products, and the scale and mix of our portfolio position us well to realize the full potential of our sites. With that, I'd like to invite the speakers back to the stage, please, and Kitty, if you would, and we'll go to Q&A. If you just bear with us, a couple of moments, we're just going to adjust the setup slightly so that you can see us all and those watching online can as well. We'll take questions from the room first, and then we'll get anything that comes in across the webcast. Thank you.(IVR) I'm going to stay standing, so just so that I can point at you all. Okay, so we have mics. Yes? Somebody going to wave for every mic. Anybody, I know we've thrown a lot at you, questions.
I've got Colm Lauder, who's just about halfway down.
Thanks, Lynda, and thanks, Lynda. Sorry for being the eager beaver, but I thought it was very interesting on the new proposal on the net zero carbon housing side of being your own direct build approach to the market. I think it's very interesting, but also a new departure as the strategy evolves. Perhaps, James Crowe, this question may be for you for a bit of detail on it, or Pete as well on the sustainability side. One of the things I'd be curious to look at is, given all the relationships you have with national and regional house builders across the portfolio, have you seen examples of those house builders taking a sort of a net carbon zero approach on their specific sites? Are there similar products being built on these locations?
Then, when we look at perhaps some of the details around it and obviously, you know, stipulating that you must have, heat exchangers, et cetera, built in, are there examples of that elsewhere in terms of are there house builders within the overall portfolio going down a similar route, or is this an entirely new point, and a new departure for your sites? Thank you.
Shall I start, and then just sort of hand into Pete and James Crowe? You will see, and I know they're going to say this, that house builders across our geography, as well as the rest of the country, that are starting to bring forward net zero carbon developments to be able to measure and to sort of, and demonstrate, you know, sort of the performance of that product, and both in terms of the technology, but also sort of the market. We are seeing that, and we're seeing that across some of our house builder customers that we work with today and have worked with for a number of years.
One of our objectives, in what we're proposing is, as a master developer, and the fact that we put all the infrastructure in, we really want to understand how this works. We want to understand how the infrastructure works, we want to understand how we can make it work on our sites and how we can integrate it. We think, I mean, as James Crowe, hopefully brought to life, that there are some more tricky sort of parts of some of our sites, that actually this is a better fit, product for. We want to make sure that we, as Harworth, actually understand how we deliver that, how it performs, because that will actually help us to unlock some areas of our sites that may be harder to do.
It's not every site that's applies to, harder to do than others, but it will also inform the discussion that we have with some of the house builders to bring some of their product into our sites. There is an element of pilot and testing on this. Do you want to pick around maybe some examples, James Crowe, of who's doing this around the region?
Yeah, I think just to clarify, the government as a whole is moving the industry towards net zero carbon. Everyone is moving gradually in that, in that direction. As I mentioned, the key focus at the moment is moving towards the Future Homes Standard, which is aiming to get people into net zero in operation by 2025. There is a big push there. I think the key differentiator that we're looking at for this pilot is how we actually zoom in on the embodied carbon, because that's something really where everyone's so focused on the operational carbon. It's how do we deal with the embodied carbon through the process of development?
With us being a master developer, we look at, you know, what does that mean in terms of the ground as well as the house building. That's to get us towards the 2030 objective, so we're looking well ahead in terms of the future, so that ultimately, when we hand the house over to the end customer, we can effectively offset any residual carbon. It's a truly net zero carbon house. I think the differentiator for our product is really about understanding the embodied carbon as well as that operational carbon target.
Pete?
I'd just add a little bit as well. Just looking forward, we're in the process of gaining new planning permissions for new residential sites. If you live in London, you'll be familiar with the carbon sort of tax arrangement that's in place in London. You'll be familiar possibly with what's coming through in Manchester and Leeds, in terms of consultation from a planning perspective. Part of the pilot is us understanding what we need to implement for those future planning permissions, and also preempting the questions that come from local authority planning departments in relation to zero carbon, not only from an operational perspective, but also from an embodied carbon perspective. Really, the whole thing feeds back into the rather complex flowchart I put on the screen earlier in terms of us understanding our impact from start to finish.
Was that actually a question?
Yeah, of course.
All right. Thank you. Thanks, Paul. Any further questions? John in the end .
Morning, John Mosley, Liberum. Can I ask a couple of questions around the affordable homes portfolio? The first one is: Are you going to actually be responsible for delivering the homes yourselves, or are you going to be just selling the land for someone else to actually deliver them? That's the first question. Then the second question was: is the idea of this, that effectively you're taking away the Section 106 responsibilities from house builders, and that makes the other parcels of land more attractive to them?
Let James Crowe do that one, yeah.
Yes. To answer the first question, we are proposing to deliver the homes on a forward-funding basis, very similar to the build-to-rent portfolio that we have in process. We're working with our delivery partners, and it will be a turnkey delivery. We won't ultimately be operating or owning the homes, just delivering them turnkey via our partners. To answer the second question, it's a blend of additionality, as we talked about earlier, where there isn't a 106 obligation and benefit from the grant funding, but also where we do have those Section 106 obligations, then, yes, the proposal is that Harworth could self-deliver those.
That really helps us with the placemaking, so that we can bring that forward earlier, and we can control whereabouts we deliver those and the quality of those homes. Then that, in turn, should drive value through subsequent land sales.
Thank you. Can I ask one last question? Sorry to ask this.
Okay.
Can you tell me what sewage cake is, please?
We're going to definitely chuck that one at Pete.
What time of day is it?
Metaphorically.
Pre-lunch. Given my response, you'd probably guess, but it's waste material that's used in lieu of fertilizer that allows soil making to occur, which then allows biodiversity, flora and fauna to flourish effectively.
James Crowe.
Was that polite enough?
Well, you didn't want to ask that question, did you?
Thank you. No, I'll ask some different questions. I mean, yeah, I guess looking backwards, you've had one route to market on the residential side. Looking forwards, you're going to have, what? Probably four, well, potentially more routes, but yeah, quite a few different routes to market. I mean, I just try to think in terms of the step change in delivering some of these bigger projects like Waverley. If you rewound the clock and you were doing Waverley, starting today, it looks like it's going to take, what, 15 years or so on the residential side. How much quicker could you do that with these different routes to market now?
moving forwards?
It's a really, really good question. Do you want to have a go, or do you want me to have a go? When we did the strategy work, let me just wind back sort of probably two years, is probably the easiest way of looking at it. Andrew Blackshaw is in the room at the back, who was involved really heavily in that story with Kitty and I. When we did the strategy work, we looked at that time, we probably had about 30,000 plots in the portfolio. We had a number of things going on. When we looked at each site in detail, you've got the absorption rate, market absorption rate for sales for those sites. Some of those were telling us we could go faster.
Waverley and Coalville, for example, Waverley, a very established location, there was demand from house builders. They knew the product. There was demand from occupiers and people to buy. All the analysis we did said we could go faster on the sales, actually, Coalville established itself really quickly, also being further south, it's a different market dynamic, again, we've been able to go sort of faster on that on sales. That analysis site by site also showed us that there were some sites around our patches where actually you might get a sale every two years or every three. That because just the local market could absorb that. When we looked at it through a rental lens, there was a very strong, you know, sort of rental market sitting there and people waiting for product.
What it's enabled us to do is probably go, you know, faster on those sites that had lower slower absorption. Let's say, we work through those, you know, but it's not necessarily twice as fast, it's not that binary, because there's a certain amount of how we phase the infrastructure, building the rent... You can't have rental product dominating a site versus the sort of sale product. They've got to go sort of in situ, in tandem. There is an acceleration, and it's that point, as you know, we were going at 860 units a year, where we sized it, so we'd be going around 2,000 unit plots a year. That sort of gives you a scale, but it's more than double, you know, so the number of units.
Site by site, it's not necessarily saying we're going twice as fast because they still all have different market dynamics. I don't know if you want to say, was that what you would have said?
I. Yeah, I think so. I would.
Yeah.
Very conveniently, yes. no, I would have said that and in a similar way at sort of Waverley, I would have thought that, you know, sort of a large site like Waverley, Coalville, was sort of running with a maximum of sort of three-four sort of outlets for house builders at any one time. You are limited by sort of the phasing that you can bring through. You also don't want too much of the alternative products on your sites as well, so there's a balance for every single site. I suppose at Waverley, we would have been thinking about, you know, a couple of phases of build-to-rent, and we started a bit earlier.
We might have had sort of a phase of, sort of affordable in there. You'd be sort of putting those alongside as sort of your house builder.
Mm-hmm.
sort of flags sort of work through. It would sort of speed it up. It wouldn't be double. My sense would be something like a third or...
Yeah
or so, sort of quicker. Every site is different, every dynamic is different, and it's important that we work with the constraints of each site to get sort of the maximum value out as we go through.
I think, James Crowe, the one other thing I'd add is it's important to look back and think about where the company was in 2015 in terms of size and scale and the capital to deploy. We're a totally different business today through that lens, and actually, we now plan on the basis that we're describing to you today, where I think actually sort of back then, it would have been much harder to have got that momentum and that speed because we wouldn't have been able to fund it, you know, sort of, you know, as we were.
Well, the build to rent sector didn't exist as well.
Yeah, another point.
It is a function of where we are now.
Yeah, yeah.
It's quite interesting as we underwrite new sites, because as Lynda says.
Yeah
... we now sort of factor in.
Yeah
sort of those mixed tenure products now into our underwrite. We're starting to sort of get visibility of how we can sort of build those in on a regular basis.
Thank you. Then maybe, Deborah, you talked about the transformation in the last five, six, seven years of Harworth. Clearly, part of that is increasing the kind of skill set within the company. You're now moving into appreciating it's relatively small amounts, but you're building houses on your own balance sheet. Does that require another kind of change in that internal kind of resource and skill set, or do you think most of that's now in place?
I mean, we've sized the company to deliver the early phases of the strategy. I mean, you can see with the sort of affordable product, you know, that's another sort of big slug of sites that we're going to be delivering on behalf of an investor. You know, actually, as we move into some of these other things, we will need to put some more resource in as we go. We're, you know, we look at each, not just the business, how it's running today and the resources we need, but actually, we're looking forward to say, actually, at the point, we've got maybe 14 sites in production at the same time, you know, on whether it's Spur or whether it's affordable or whatever.
Actually, you know, as James Crowe has outlined, there's him plus two. It stands to reason, even with the skill set in the regional teams, the regional teams are active across not just residential, but they've got the sort of commercial in there as well. We will continue to sort of put resource into the team to support the delivery, and where we're driving and unlocking value.
James Crowe, I would just sort of pick up on your point about sort of building on balance sheet, and we are with the net zero carbon product. We've got 30,000 plots in the pipeline. We've got sort of 7,000-8,000 sort of consented. We're delivering 2,000 plots a year, that we're talking about 100 homes in the first instance. This is very much about sort of trialing it as a system, taking the learnings for what does that mean, just to James Crowe point on sort of embodied carbon, what does it mean for the infrastructure that we put into our sites, like Ironbridge , we're delivering them sort of fully electric. How can we sort of help the house builders to up their product as well?
At the moment, it's not that sort of, that big sort of shift.
I think just to add to that, if you think about our product for house builders, it's service remediated land. The service remediated land product of five years ago is not going to be the service remediated land of five years in the future. It's all part about us getting to grips with that, actually.
Oh, you need to go back up.
Thanks. It's Lee Marshall from the PPF. Two questions. One more general, which is sort of how do you balance in a project like Waverley or generally, projects like Highfield Park and placemaking with monetizing the space that you have to work with? The second question, which is probably for Pete, which is why not start the sequestration projects earlier, rather than leaving them right till the end of the process?
Can you do the first one?
Yeah, I mean, I'm a firm believer that actually, I think, Harworth is in a really unique position as a major strategic landowner, that actually, the initiatives around placemaking and ESG and value creation actually go hand in hand. There's not many companies that I think can say that, but as Harworth, I do believe that when you create the right facilities, you create the right sort of social value you put in place, so the schools, the shops, the, you know, the Highfield Parks of this world. What that enables is ultimately more people to want to come and live on your site, which does do something for supporting and building the land values and the also sort of house prices on the site as well.
I do think there's that link. I think the other thing is it's really important we make commitments to our communities as well, as part of sort of securing our planning applications, a part of looking at delivering sites that look and feel like Harworth as well, and we think quite a lot about that. It's not necessarily, for us, about just building sort of the densest, the densest sort of schemes. It's about having sort of the right balance, because we believe that that will go to delivering sort of value over the long run. It's, it's sort of, it's not always, You're always sometimes making a little bit of a leap of faith on some of that.
I think sort of when we compare places like Waverley, and we look at it relative to sort of the market growth, we can see that actually, we create something that's quite special, where people want to be. That's very much how we, how we approach and sort of size it through, and look at how actually we can, through that placemaking, deliver a premium on other schemes, too.
Can I just add-
Add?
A little bit to that, actually? Yeah.
Yeah.
I think back to the mixed tenure and the acceleration, I think it's really exciting bit for me and in terms of cash flowing the full development cycle. It's the projects like Highfield Park, instead of coming towards the end of the development, actually, if you hit a critical mass earlier because of the diversification, then you can start delivering the really key infrastructure much earlier in the cycle. That for me is the exciting bit.
Pete.
The sequestration question? If you look at the two graphs within the back, very much split into our corporate emissions, roughly 1,000 tons for last year, and our development emissions, which would be substantially larger. The way we've approached this, and if you're familiar with the offset market, as it stands, it's quite a gray area. The way we're approaching it is, for our corporate emissions, we're looking at being in control of our own sequestration, deliberately using different terminology to offsets. The reason that sequestration comes in in the future years, is hopefully to allow us to grow a number of facilities. If you use woodland planting, for instance, as a sequestration process, the benefits of that doesn't accrue for five, six, seven years until the trees start to mature.
You'll see that sequestration starts roughly in five, six, seven years' time, give or take. More widely on the offsetting side of things for our development, as I said, it is a gray area at the moment. There are no strict definitions. There is an emerging market. You'll have seen the BBC press articles recently around offsetting. We're taking a very considered approach to that, and we'll be developing our strategy in relation to potential offsets in the main around our embodied carbon emissions. Our ethos and our commercial build and our residential product is to address the operational emissions/energy challenge through good design.
The embodied carbon element, we want to keep a really close eye on, and that will come through further development of our specifications, but also as planning authorities start to implement, sort of carbon emission tax processes as well.
Calum.
Thanks for the presentation, guys. A few left for me, I think. The first one, just following on, Lynda, from the comment you made on resources, going onto the residential side. I suppose in addition to, you know, additional people that may be required to go down the more diversified route that you spoke of, it's also an additional skill set, and I wonder if you can give us an idea of the scale that you think is required in the business to satisfy that. But also whether to date, you've found that the availability of people with that skill set, whether it be dealing with AHBs and other entities like that, whether that's something that's been easily satisfied for the business, or whether that could be a sticking point going forward.
Second one, just more big picture on residential, how your thinking has evolved, or whether the thinking could evolve on the suitability for these residential developments ultimately to fall into the income portfolio, and whether that's, it could be suitable within the business in that way in the future. The third is just on sustainability. I suppose there's a lot of very long-term targets set out in the presentation. We know that you've had a focus on this for quite a while. I wonder to what extent you've been able to, or what extent we'll continue to see Harworth push this into the remuneration strategy more generally, whether that be at a senior management level or across the rest of the business, and how that has progressed to date. Thanks.
Okay, I might just answer that very last part of that very last point really quickly, and then I'll bring sort of Pete and the team in to maybe sort of add a bit more color, but just because it'll be at the front of my mind. Last year, we had in our group scorecard, we had a 5% target for the entire business on ESG, for 2022. So that last year being 2022. For 2023, that's 10%, so it's in all of our, every member of the Harworth team in the room. It's actually in all of our sort of targets. We've taken that approach because we think it's really important to basically walk the walk, you know, sort of within the business, in, in terms of how it links into our remuneration.
That's just like your snapshot. It's in there already. We've grown it, you know, year on year from five to 10, I'll come back maybe to Pete to talk about some of the other things, 'cause there's a lot going on in that ESG and net zero carbon pathway space. In terms of resourcing into the company, we've grown significantly, as you'll have seen, it's reflected in the overhead, you know, costs that you see in our annual reports. We don't see ourselves in the next period growing at the same rate as we've grown in, you know, in the last two and a half years.
We will continue to grow, but it's more selectively about making sure we're supplementing resource, you know, sort of into parts of the business where, you know, we're opening either new areas up to create value or to sort of create profits and grow. If you, if you look back over, I think since I joined, we've probably had between 30 and 50 people join, depending on which financial year you look at. Some of those have replaced sort of people who were, who have either left the company or we had interims. We've grown quite significantly and actually upskilled, you know, sort of the sort of business or in terms of putting more of the skills in that we need.
We don't see that the next phase of that strategy is going to need that same sort of leap again. We will need to grow probably, I suspect, over the next sort of few years by, you know, sort of 10-20, as we roll out some of these initiatives, and the business continues to scale up, 'cause that's the phase we're in. You know, we're in the phase of scaling up a business. Actually, that means we've got more and more things moving simultaneously. Is that fine?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you want me to take question two?
Yeah.
Yeah. I think, I think that was around sort of holding residential products within the, within the investment portfolio, and I certainly think that's sort of a really interesting sort of opportunity for us as we progress sort of maybe into the middle term, sort of medium term, as we prove sort of the product, and continue to sort of deliver the mixed tenure products across the sites. I think at this stage, we're very conscious that actually managing a residential portfolio is very different from managing an industrial and logistics portfolio. We already have an experienced asset management team.
We've got sort of GBP 250 million of industrial and logistics space, so sort of holding and managing sort of that part is a very natural sort of progression of the industrial and logistics development pipeline. It's something that we've been doing for years anyway, and so part of that transitioning through. The residential side, at the moment, we see probably the investment portfolio being met more by industrial and logistics than residential. I think as it becomes a more sort of established market, as we understand the product, it's definitely something that we'll continue to keep an eye on.
We do have some of those skills or people with that skill set in the business from a fund management or an asset management lens. They're all doing different things at the moment. That skill set is there, it's just not deployed at the moment into sort of holding that resi stock. I just want to come back on, you asked me how easy we were finding it to hire and to find skills. I mean, I was at a South Yorkshire CEO networking thing actually last night, and skills is the number one on everybody's, you know, sort of priority on all of the CEOs, you know, sort of lists in terms of being able to sustain and grow their businesses, you know. Actually, we've been really successful in hiring in a really difficult market.
It comes back to something Pete said in the people slide. You know, we want to make ourselves the employer of choice. We want to make sure that the people within our business have a career path that they can see in Harworth. That means, you know, sort of a lot of the work that we've done over the last couple of years around remuneration, around well-being, around some of the policies that we've brought in, actually are all going to support that side of it. Fundamentally, Harworth's got a really strong culture. I mean, I hope you've seen it here. People are massively proud about what they do, and we do think we make a difference. I think that's a magnet actually, for people who want to just come and work in a great company.
we've been really good at hiring over the last sort of, 18-24 months, and we're continuing to make sure that the company, is seen, you know, sort of to be that place to go to. Pete?
On the ESG, the only one thing I would add, It kind of hopefully comes across in the interlocking model that we demonstrated with Harworth Way, is that we don't necessarily see ESG and sustainability as a separate thing to what we do. It's an integral part of it. Alongside the measures that-
Mm-hmm
Lynda's described, the other targets, by their very nature, embed ESG and sustainability measures within them, whether that's around the commercial buildings or residential master planning. We're very much trying to take the ESG and sustainability arena and embed it as quickly as we can, as the legislation and regulation arrives, straight into that delivery model, and then it manifests itself through what we deliver. Hopefully that gives you a bit of a steer.
Okay. Any more questions in the room? Have you got any online?
We've got 2 online, yeah. Could I just borrow the mic again, please? Sorry. Perfect. Thank you.
Got me here.
...
We try not to give you the mic.
The first question is the planning system making it hard to, or is it delaying approvals for sites like Skelton Grange and Gascoigne Wood? If so, what levers do you have as a business to pull to speed that process up?
The answer is yes, but it's not peculiar to Harworth. It's, you know, any major house builder will talk to you about it. Any developer will talk to you about the planning system. Basically, is not massively user-friendly, and it has got slower. It's got slower for a number of reasons. COVID, actually, saw an extraordinary amount of planning applications go in for domestic things, alongside all the sort of big commercial sort of schemes, that would have been put forward, and it's broadly going into the same funnel and the same teams in local authorities. There is a sort of volume issue that's going on here. There is a resourcing issue. Local authorities have struggled to retain and recruit planners, and it's different. The bigger authorities tend to have more resource.
Smaller authorities can actually sort of struggle and be more challenged. We work really hard on relationships with local authorities. It's massively important. There is a hearts and minds things there. You know, they need to believe what you're doing as a business is going to be great for their communities. They still have a governance process to go through, that, you know, sort of they are able to defend any decisions they make. It has been slower than I think at any point in my career in the last two to five years. We continue to bash away at the most senior levels, as well as actually the most junior levels in planning authorities to push the schemes forward.
Your ultimate sanction, of course, is like, you know, you take it to, you know, pursue a case for non-determination of an application. It's a very hostile act. It doesn't win you friends, and actually, sort of, you know, my experience is, people have long memories. That's not Harworth. We try to get there consensually in a way that delivers the right scheme, you know, sort of in the right location. It is taking time. There are resource constraints. We've had local elections. We've got focus now turning to a general election. We've got combined authorities forming, who are taking a look at everything that's coming into them, it is just a case of we just keep pushing away, like I say, from the most senior to the most junior level to get them through.
My experience is planning's always been hard. It's something we're really good at, but it is taking us time.
Thank you very much. The second question, I think, is probably more for Kitty. It is, you mentioned, the use of local authority funding to deliver some of your sites. Is this part of your funding package going forwards?
Yes. Yes, but it's not something new. Whenever we sort of underwrite a site, we're always looking at where might there be pockets of capital that we can tap into. I think the important thing on our sites is we don't rely on that money. It can be quite short-termism as and when it sort of comes available, but we absolutely do make use of it. We've used it at Waverley, we've used it at sort of Logistics North, where Moss Nook, we're using it at Chatterley at the moment as well. We do use those in. It comes in in a variety of forms.
It comes in grant form, comes in loans as well. Also, we access sort of local authority, sort of pension fund type money as well, to sometimes sort of borrow as well against those sites, which typically the sort of money is looking at what are the social outcomes, what jobs are we creating, what's the GVA, et cetera, how are we approaching the development. Sometimes the pricing on that can be attractive as well. We've also used, obviously, sort of Homes England money in the past, as well. Lots of different sources. We're always looking at what's the best use of sort of funding, where can we pull it from on our schemes?
It's, it is, I think, I always think it's quite nice that we have, we have success, almost without it as well, but, where we can use it, then we do.
Great. Thank you very much. There's no more questions from the webcast.
Have we got any more questions from those in the room? You've got the rest of the afternoon with us, so you can ask us anything you've not wanted to ask us in here. I'd just like to thank those people who've joined us online. If there's anything occurs to you after this, please message us, and we'll come back to you. For those in the room, thank you for listening, and I think we've got some lunch outside, and then we'll start the tour of the sites. Thank you, everybody. Thanks.