At St Mungo’s, we aim to embed environmental responsibility, social impact, and strong governance into everything we do. By aligning our services, properties and partnerships with sustainable practices, we ensure that our mission to end homelessness is both impactful today and resilient for the future.
Our strategy is structured by three strategic pillars that underpin how we become a more sustainable organisation:
Our journey to net zero
As climate change intensifies, our clients face growing risks making safe, energy-efficient housing essential for saving lives, cutting costs for our clients and reducing
our carbon footprint.
Lasting social impact
Creating lasting social impact by empowering clients
through involvement, training and support – ensuring our
services not only end homelessness but also build stronger, more inclusive communities.
Doing the right things, in the right
way, for the right reasons
Upholding strong governance by embedding sustainability into decision making, ensuring accountability and ethical leadership to end homelessness responsibly.
The strategy is delivered through six Focus Areas and six Enablers. This groups our activity by the themes of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). We have also aligned this strategy with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and the Sustainability Reporting Standard for social housing (SRS). This is to illustrate how our sustainability goals match with both internationally recognised standards and homelessness and housing best practice, helping benchmark our progress against the housing sector.
This strategy outlines how we will deliver Phase 1 of our sustainability journey, to build a foundation up to 2030 that enables us to expand our sustainability ambitions in Phase 2 of our journey from 2030.
We have already made significant progress, including securing £3.5m in funding for retrofitting for delivery of the Warm Homes Programme. We will build on our achievements to date through the development and reporting of the Sustainability Reporting Standard that will enable us to measure and communicate the broader impact of our work.
This framework strengthens how we report on our sustainability journey and will act as our annual ESG report, empowering us to bring our supporters and partners along on our path to end homelessness and rebuild lives sustainably.
The UN SDGs highlighted here are those that most closely align with our purpose and where St Mungo’s can make a meaningful contribution. Although all the SDGs are interlinked, we have focused our strategy and consequent effort on where we can have the greatest impact. These SDGs provide a framework for how our ESG pillars contribute to wider global ambitions, and while the government reports on most of the SDGs, we are taking them as a starting point in defining our approach to sustainability.
We promote access to clean energy by improving the energy efficiency of our housing stock, implementing smart meters in our properties and transitioning to renewable energy sources across our estate.
We contribute by reducing rough sleeping and promoting stable housing solutions to build inclusive communities.
We reduce waste through prevention, promoting sustainable procurement and improving energy usage across our portfolio.
We support climate resilience by promoting sustainable housing and homelessness services delivery and reducing the environmental impact of homelessness.
We enhance biodiversity and green spaces through initiatives like Putting Down Roots and Pride in Our Places, creating healthier environments for clients and communities.
We tackle poverty by providing housing support and helping our clients to achieve financial independence and stability.
We integrate health support into our recovery model, addressing mental and physical health challenges linked to homelessness.
We support learning for both our clients and colleagues through offering access to internal and external training, mentoring, apprenticeships and career development opportunities.
We promote gender equality through family friendly leave policies, flexible and agile working and 7 colleague diversity networks, supporting inclusive employment practices and we don’t have a gender pay gap.
We offer training and employment support to clients and colleagues – committing to the Real Living Wage, advancing EDI initiatives and supporting apprenticeships and career development.
By advocating for fair policies and supporting marginalised groups, we work to reduce systemic inequalities in the homelessness system.
We advocate for inclusive decision making in collaboration with decision makers and our clients to strengthen institutional responses to homelessness and rough sleeping.
Partnerships are central to the success of our missions and achieving sustainable impact in collaboration with our key collaborators, including how we work in partnership with other organisations to be a good employer.
We have made steps that we can build on in each of the pillars of this strategy that will help us become a more sustainable organisation.
Successfully applied for £3.5m grant funding to improve all our properties to EPC C
Purchased 100% renewable energy
Delivered our Putting Down Roots gardening training at 37 different hostel sites
Refreshed our Client Involvement Strategy
Operated 2,281 social housing units in 2023-24
116 people secured a job through accessing our Employment Support Service
Published a Race Equity Review to show progress to becoming an anti-racist organisation
Increased the protected time colleagues have to engage with our 7 Diversity Networks
Refined our strategy landscape to increase efficiency and introduce a shared vision
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The Climate Change Act (2008) commits the UK government to reach net-zero by 2050. Achieving this national target will require fundamental changes to our economy and society, to reach net-zero.
To achieve this target, every organisation is being asked to play their part in driving emission reductions down, as effectively and equitably as possible. With delivering people-centred homelessness services our core priority, this strategy demonstrates how improving the sustainability of our operations will enhance, rather than divert, the resources needed to deliver them.
In 2025-26, we supported 28,402 people who were homeless, or at risk of homelessness and anticipate this number will continue to rise as more people struggle with rising prices for essential services and goods. For example, the Government’s annual fuel poverty statistics show that in 2024 there were an estimated 11% of households (2.73 million) in fuel poverty in England.
That’s why, we have a responsibility to ensure our approach to housing those who need it most decreases our client’s exposure to fuel poverty which could increase their risk to a return to homelessness. We will continue to develop our data landscape to enable us to make strategic decisions on our path to net-zero as well as delivering improvements to our properties and services to reduce our carbon footprint.
In 2025-26, 80% of our clients were satisfied with the service we provided and 76% stated that they satisfied with the contribution to our neighbourhood. With these scores 5% and 11% higher than the sector average, we are proud that our clients recognise how we deliver services that not only support them in their journeys to rebuild their lives, but also have a positive impact on the local communities we operate in.
However, we recognise that there is more to do to articulate and measure our social impact. That’s why we have created our Impact Roadmap that defines the role St Mungo’s has in achieving outcomes towards our purpose of ending homelessness and rebuilding lives.
This is not about narrowing our ambition but making intentional choices and focussing our resources on the activities that deliver the greatest impact for the people we serve. Through this strategy, we will operationalise our Impact Roadmap to connect our local service delivery to our organisational purpose and ambitions whilst also developing our approach to social value to improve how we talk about the impact that we have.
As a charity and a registered provider of social housing, we know that sustainability is essential to our long-term impact. The Governance pillar of this strategy outlines how we are ensuring accountability and scrutiny are wrapped into a robust governance structure. We are required to meet several regulatory requirements, including from the Regulator of Social Housing. This ensures that we are well governed, financially viable and retain high service delivery standards to our clients.
To this end, we are also guided by our Code of Governance, committing the Board to prioritise carbon neutrality and environmental sustainability. Our trustees and leadership are committed to leading St Mungo’s to achieving our core purpose and are complemented by our Client Advisory Board (CAB) made up of existing and former clients to ensure they have a say in our key decisions and direction.
Whilst the Board also has a Lived Experience Trustee too to ensure a golden thread of lived experience throughout our governance structures. Through this strategy we will continue to strengthen our governance frameworks, ethical leadership and commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion. This includes refining our policy and procedure landscape, how we audit our services to ensure we are holding our standards to account and continuing our journey to becoming an anti-racist organisation through our ED&I Strategy and Anti-Racist Action Plan.