Inclusion, Belonging and Wellbeing Report 2024-2025

At Karbon, we’ve developed five commitments to inclusion and belonging, and we’re proud to share these with you. We’re even more proud to bring these to life for you through storytelling and case studies over the next few pages. By sharing real-life example case studies, we aim to show you the impact of our efforts and that our commitments are more than just words on paper.

Our Inclusion Hubs support us in raising awareness and help to share and highlight any support we offer. Just some of the initiatives they’ve helped us to promote this year include Autism Awareness, Men’s Mental Health, International Women’s Day, Time to Talk Day, LGBTQ+ History Month, White Ribbon Day, International Men’s Day, Black History Month, National Inclusion Week and Pride Month.  

Our Health Advocates and Mental Health Allies support us to raise awareness through our health and wellbeing campaigns, such as Mental Health Awareness Week, Time to Talk Day, suicide prevention week, and our own awareness raising activity through women’s and men’s health months. The activity all supports our five pillars of wellbeing.

In Byker, we own and manage 1,800 homes on the iconic Grade II* listed estate. Byker is home to a diverse community. There are 26 recognised languages spoken amongst customers on the Estate and it is a community with a rich ethnic and cultural mix, which makes it a truly special place to live.  

Our Thriving Byker Strategy focuses on our community with engagement events and projects that extend our reach. We’ve worked with Byker Mutual Aid on a language learning group to support Ukrainians to speak English and working with Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service to help customers to keep their homes safe. 

Working across the ages, this year we’ve supported a family trip to Beamish and an over 55’s trip to Woodhorn. We were pleased to share the local culture and heritage sights with our diverse communities.  
Equally, we want to learn more about the heritage of our community. We supported an event at African Community Advice North East (ACANE) to run alongside an ITVX documentary, and we funded food, music and a creative activity looking at African Heritage.

54North Homes builds, manages and looks after more than 4,000 affordable homes for customers across Leeds and Yorkshire. The housing association was formed in December 2022, through a merger between Leeds & Yorkshire Housing Association and York Housing Association and is a subsidiary of the Karbon Homes Group. 

To help reduce isolation, 54North partnered with an organisation called Talk, Listen, Change (TLC) to offer free counselling sessions for customers with fully qualified counsellors.

 We know many people are experiencing tough times and talking to someone can make all the difference. 54North funds a course of 10 one-to-one sessions and these can take place via telephone or Zoom. 

• 85 people have been referred since the project began
• 307 counselling sessions have been offered since the start of the project
• 36 people completed the Short Warwick Edinburgh Mental Health Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS) and there has been an 83% improvement in their emotional wellbeing
• 100% said they were very satisfied or satisfied with their session experience

54North held five customer engagement events in four supported living schemes at Rothwell (Whitby), Elemetes (Leeds), Bretgate (York) and Central York. The events provided them with an opportunity to engage with customers and the local community – to celebrate differences and understand each other. 
  
They were very well attended by a wide range of customers from different religions, cultures and backgrounds. Those attending were able to chat and get to know each other – a good example was a newly arrived family whose first language was not English. The local community helped this family to integrate by sharing and exchanging food. 54North’s Customer Experience Manager, Abida visited the family to see how best we could support them and some of our customers were invited to a Christmas lunch.

To support 54North’s ambition of working with young people with autism and other learning difficulties by providing meaningful work experience, they have been working with DFN Project Search.

DFN Project SEARCH is a national charity that enables young adults who have a learning disability or autism spectrum condition to secure meaningful permanent employment.

54North is aiming to become a host organisation and DFN is helping them to find a local education provider who can support the programme, and we look forward to sharing more information soon.

Through 54North’s partnership with Leeds City College, it invited a group of students into the organisation to find out more about what they do and how it could support the college’s Supported Internship Programme. 54North has offered internships in any of its roles across the business and in September, they’ll welcome its first internship student to work within its Estates Team for three months, our Site Safety Team for three months and then another three months of their choice. 54North has created an internal support network and raised awareness with its colleagues about what they can do to ensure the student thrives over the nine-month placement.

Our Inclusion and Belonging Strategic Action Plan, with our overall business strategy, the Stronger Foundation Strategy, details our actions and measures for the coming years. We know there’s a lot to do and we’re making good progress, and we’re determined to make a difference.

This year, we’ll refresh our plan, incorporating the latest regulations and legislation and the regulationfrom our accreditations with National Centre for Diversity and Better Health at Work. This will see new actions and ambitions, which we’ll share in our next report.

While we are committed to equality and diversity because of its importance to us, we also have some legal duties to meet.   
To help to put the report in context, we’d like to share information about the Equality Duty. It’s an important piece of legislation that ensures that everyone in the UK is treated equally and fairly. The duty exists to provide equal opportunities and rights to us all, and to stop (rather than just respond to) discrimination and harassment.

It requires organisations, like ours, to consider the impact our decisions, services or policies may have on people with ‘protected characteristics’. These include age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief and sex and sexual orientation. It’s against the law to discriminate against anyone because of these characteristics. By holding public organisations accountable for promoting equality, the UK Equality Duty helps to challenge discrimination and create a more fair and inclusive society for all. You can read more about the duty and the law here: UK Government – Equality Duty.

For the purpose of this report, we’ve used the Census 2021 data. We also continue to monitor our representation based on the housing stock and census data as provided by the National Housing Federation data monitoring tool which helps to review our data across the sector.

Gender identity data only started to be collected in the 2021 census. However, as an organisation, we have limited data in the category to make any meaningful comparisons. We are working to improve this through our focused data campaigns where our ambition is to improve the data in all categories for colleagues and customers.

We collect our ethnicity, faith and religion data in sub-categories, however, in terms of our reporting, these statistics have been grouped into the leading categories.

The customer data is based on the main tenant of the property. Census data is based on 2021 averages across areas where Karbon Homes Group owns stock. Leazes Homes data has been included in this year’s figures, for customer, board and census data. The colleagues that support Leazes Homes are included in the Karbon Homes figures as that is who they are employed by.