Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We're the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment. I'm Zoe Averson, a policy analyst at Green Alliance. One of the biggest challenges for decarbonising the UK is addressing the way

we heat our homes. Most are heated by gas boilers and our housing stock is poorly insulated,

meaning much of the heat we produce is wasted. Of course, as gas prices spiral, wasting less

heat and getting energy bills down is more important than ever. This won't be straightforward,

and although

insulated homes will save money in the long term there can be some significant

upfront costs. This week I spoke to Claire Tracy chief strategy and sustainability

officer at Nationwide. We discussed the 50 million homes which are owner-occupied and

how they can be helped to upgrade their energy efficiency.

Welcome, Claire. I thought I'd start first by asking, why are lenders like nationwide interested

in greening the UK's homes? To start with nationwide, obviously a building society, not a bank,

so we're a kind of mutual society and we're

owned by our 16 million members. So we do have a big interest in kind of wider society.

And we also have a particular interest in the housing market because we're the UK's number two

mortgage lender. Now housing is actually 16% of the total UK carbon emissions. Basically, like millions of people spend hundreds

of pounds a year, effectively heating air outside their house because we have a number of, you know,

pretty old, pretty leaky properties. So we're really interested in this because it will benefit

our members to be in houses that are well insulated, that are energy efficient, where the run

cost is lower,

but also because it will help the UK tackle a really big and quite intractable part of our

carbon emissions.

Is that built into sort of nationwide's mission?

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