Orchard Trust’s approach to ESG – with CEO Cathy Andrews.
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In this episode we're continuing our deep dive into ESG in the health and social care sector by spotlighting Orchard Trust. Today we're welcoming the CEO, Cathy Andrews, who will talk to us about all things ESG at Orchard Trust, so looking at how they approach energy efficiency, managing their staff, policies, and more.
Cathy, tell us a little bit about yourself and give us an overview of Orchard Trust.
Yes of course and it’s lovely to be here with you today as well.
Orchard Trust is a charity providing a home for life for people with learning and associated physical disabilities. We do that through a range of residential and supported living homes, a day service based on a smallholding and a therapy suite with a hydrotherapy pool and a rebound trampoline.
I’ve been the Chief Executive Officer here for seven years, having previously been the Trust’s finance and HR manager. I like that my daily work has a direct and positive impact on peoples’ lives, it’s very fulfilling. Outside of work I spend a lot of time in the countryside with my dogs and my family when they’re all home from university.
Policy-wise, what has been your driver for setting up a more kind of formalised policy for ESG?
It is really just that – to formalise and give structure to the work we’ve done so far.
We’ve done lots of little bits and different people doing different things and it’s nice to bring that all together and help others to understand what we’re doing and why. The policy itself is incomplete because once you start digging into a topic it can become quite overwhelming. So I stopped trying to write a comprehensive policy and have started on a simple, clearer version for people.
The recent increases in energy costs was a useful push to encourage the trustee board to really make sustainability a priority into the future, and they are now absolutely embracing the changes and pushing me for more. Climate change will have a notable impact on our clients, not just the increasing costs of energy, food, etc. but the hot summers – some of our people struggle to regulate their temperature, they are impacted quite greatly and also we’re based in Lydbrook and we’re very prone to flooding, so the sudden rain does have quite a lot of challenges for staffing as well.
So it sounds like you do have some particular areas of focus at Orchard Trust for your ESG efforts. Is that right?
Yeah, absolutely. So when I’ve been looking into sustainability, the three main areas to focus on are energy, transport and food. We started implementing a meat free day per week and to see if we could become more sustainable with the food we buy.
But I’m fully aware of the negative effects of big agriculture are far wider-ranging than just meat consumption, but it’s a difficult place to navigate through and to bring people along with you. So we’ve decided to make meaningful improvements in the areas which are more structural and don’t require a behavioural change.
So in late 2023, we undertook an energy audit and we’re working through the recommendations to minimise our energy usage. We’ve also changed our energy contracts from April next year to be fully renewable with wind, solar and tidal and all of our gas that we use at that point will be green gas, so that will significantly reduce our carbon footprint.
Another thing we’ve done is we’ve reviewed our staff pensions, and we’re looking to a new provider who will be able to provide a greater return for the staff, reduce the fees charged and are more environmentally sustainable. So that’s a really wide-ranging benefit, I think, for people on that one. And because we’ve got quite a lot of land, we’ve got a smallholding and each of our care homes has a garden, we’re looking to increase biodiversity.
So I don’t know if our charity will ever make it to net zero, but if we can do some sort of internal carbon offsetting where we accept at this point there is an element of carbon production that we cannot mitigate, but we can help balance that out with increasing biodiversity I think that would be a really beneficial thing we can do as well.
What have been the challenges in addressing ESG and trying to formalise it at the same time into a policy?
I think initially it was knowing where to start – there was so much information out there and it is quite overwhelming in quantity and also in the calculations for determining your carbon footprint. So doing that alongside the day job was difficult, is difficult, but there are some good webinars and other organisations out there which are set up to support and I’ve also found that human or staff buy in is quite difficult.
People are very keen, they want to do the right thing but in the reality of being in the homes and working it’s something else I need to think about. So it’s really important to make doing the right thing the easy option. So recycling is easier than just putting it in the landfill bin and that helps, but yeah it’s challenging.
You touched on it there but how have the staff been involved in kind of addressing the ESG issues?
So we have environment champions across the organisation. We meet every couple of months sharing the progress, bringing good ideas and that’s also been really useful for me to understand the practicalities of implementing things in the care homes especially things like reducing the amount – we use a tumble dryer, you know, it’s needed, if we’re constantly washing, we need to constantly dry things and you can’t always do that outside. So that’s been a useful learning point for myself.
I think the staff understand the wider social support we’re doing to our community, especially through the smallholding and our day service, so they’re engaged.
And you mentioned the smallholding you have on your land. I guess getting out kind of on the land that you have around Orchard Trust is good for your residents. Is that a way they've benefited? Are there any other ways they've benefited from the changes you've made?
They really are benefiting. The site is lovely and all of our clients can come and access it whenever they want to.
We received some funding last year to build a natural pond, which has increased the educational, sensory and relaxation opportunities for clients, staff and the families and one of our clients really enjoys being part of the environment group and he does soft plastic recycling across some of our sites, others quite like going to the tip or doing the glass recycling. So, you know, they’re engaged in it as well as far as their abilities allow them to.
So how do you measure the goals that you've put in place for or that you hope to put in place for ESG?
So this is an area we’re quite weak in. We’ve got the raw data of what we’ve been using, what we’ve been doing, but we haven’t really put it together in a baseline and then being able to show the progression.
But I’m meeting with the net zero business navigator at our local growth hub in the next couple of weeks, and he’s able to work with me on a tool to be able to calculate our current position, and then we’ll be able to understand better the changes that we’re making and be able to help us determine which areas to tackle next and which ones are okay to wait for a little bit longer. So that’s useful.
And also as a charity, we’re able to access grants and funding for some of the things we want to do. We’ve recently applied for a large sum of money for electric charging ports and solar panels, which would be wonderful if we are lucky enough to achieve it.
So a new government is obviously in place now - what do you hope to see in terms of policy going forward, both environmentally from them, but also looking at the social care side of ESG specifically as well?
So I think regarding sustainability, I would like them to make it easier to do the right thing both in process and in a financial way for sustainability to be at the heart of the decisions they make, because that will then cascade down through the country and gives each organisation more oomph to be able to do it.
From a social care point of view, I think there’s an awful lot of room within prevention that needs to be funded you know, because supporting people to live well, even if they have poor health is so important. It reduces the critical impact on police, NHS as well as obviously social care so it will reduce the cost that the government needs to spend on things, but it also reduces a wider social injustice and it makes everybody’s lives easier. So prevention would be an area that I would hope they will look to support.
In terms of your ESG journey again, what kind of support is out there?
So there’s quite a few local companies that provide energy audits and some of them are funded. They can tap into government funding for organisations. So we’ve used a local company for our energy audits.
We also link with local community groups and the local council’s green plans so we can link in with them and make sure we’re all working in the same way to the same goals within our local area and the local council are also going to provide some sustainability support to care providers over the next few months, which I think is going to be really beneficial.
Even our bank has provided some support because it helps them to reach their sustainability goals, so it’s looking at suppliers and seeing how we can all work a little bit together to support each other as well.
What would you say are the most important lessons you have learned while trying to develop your ESG policy?
I think the most important thing is to acknowledge that it is big and complicated. So seek help wherever you can and don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
There’s a lot of people doing a lot of work in this area that are more than happy to share it with you and to help and support you through it. So start with the easy things you know, do the low hanging fruit where you can and if staff buy in is difficult, then make the changes that do not rely on human action. Do structural changes because that makes an improvement and creates time and space to rethink your internal communications and try another way to bring people on board. But to be proud of the things that you are doing well. I recently attended a webinar from Waterwise looking at reducing water usage and realised that we were already doing most of the recommendations that they suggested without even knowing that that was the right thing to do. It was a definite bonus. And don’t feel bad when things don’t go to plan or if it’s taking longer than you hoped because anything is better than nothing and there’s always tomorrow to carry on.
Great advice. Cathy Andrews, thank you very much for your time.
Listen to our series on ESG in the health & social care sector.

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