ALEO National Executive meeting regional update for ALEO South East

[ALEO Admin]

- provided by Carol White, Chair of ALEO South East, for the ALEO Executive meeting held on 14 April 2016.

Details of any meetings held and/or forthcoming:

The ALEO South East meeting was held on 24th February 2016 at Guildford BC.

We had 3 excellent speakers as follows:

• Better Homes , Better health presentation, Alexandra Steeland Project Officer, National Energy Foundation
In partnership with Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire local authorities, the National Energy Foundation has recently launched a scheme to offer grants of up to £2,500 for energy efficiency improvements for those with a health condition which may be impacted by living in a cold or damp home. Alex Steeland, Project Manager, presented the aims and objectives of the scheme, the approach, opportunities and barriers, and learning to date.

• Don't leave park homes out in the cold campaign presentation, Alice Woudhuysen, Senior Campaigns Officer Age UK
Alice runs Age UK’s campaign for warm homes and campaign for warm park homes, which are calling on the Government to reform its energy efficiency programmes to enable all older people to live in a warm home.

• Smarter targeting with Southampton Healthy Homes presentation, Adam Goulden, Chief Executive , the Environment Centre
The Environment Centre (tEC) has led a successful partnership bid for a new and innovative project, Southampton Healthy Homes. £500,000 has been secured from British Gas Energy Trust to support a unique project which presents an exciting opportunity for the organisation to better engage with health led services. The central theme of the project is smarter targeting. To that end tEC has seconded a health care professional to help them engage with GP practices and community nurses across the city in order to identify the most vulnerable and hard to reach patients. They have also seconded a community champion from a local community development organisation to coordinate with Southampton’s multi-faith communities and broaden the project’s reach. In addition tEC has purchased EPC data for the city and used it produced an interactive map. The map allows them to run multiple queries simultaneously to identify homes with particular characteristics.

Details of any other events held and/or forthcoming:

Our next forum meeting will be held on 22nd June at Chiltern DC

Details of any current projects:

Please see our minutes for the members project updates

Any other comments, e.g. issues or barriers:

We have now gone through a secretariat recruitment process. This has been rather time consuming but the Executive Committee felt that after 10 years with the current service provider we should advertise to make sure we were receiving ‘best value for money’. This created a good response with excellent applications, and we now have SE2, Rachael Mills who will provide our secretariat services; we look forward to working with SE2 during the next three years.

Our treasurer Cati Smith has now gone on maternity leave and our treasurer’s post is vacant at present. We are hopeful however, that this post will be filled shortly once approval has been given.

With the name change we have also had to change our name with the bank. This has also created some red tape issues.