Judith Everett on Decarbonising the Crown Estate

The Crown Estate is a collection of lands and holdings in the United Kingdom (UK) belonging to the British monarch. It is one of the largest property managers in the UK, administering property worth £15.6 billion.

In this first episode of the new Okana Podcast, host, Okana Managing Director Dr Graham Kelly invited Judith Everett, Executive Director of Purpose, Sustainability and Stakeholder for the Crown Estate, to talk about its commitment to sustainability and why it is placing an emphasis on net zero and biodiversity.

When asked what good looks like for the Crown Estate, Judith replied: “What good looks like is that we have this phrase of “everything is connected”. We really want people to be thinking of connected systems and how working in systems, and being part of those in a way that we can help drive change for a bigger dynamic flourishing ecosystem”.

Can you give us the background to the Crown Estate and the portfolio if manages?
Shall I do a bit of a history lesson?

The Crown Estate really is quite an extraordinary organisation. Our history can be traced back to 1066, but I’ll start a little bit later than that, otherwise, the whole podcast will be taken up with this (one for another time!).

In 1760, George III handed over some assets of his personal holdings to the treasury in return for an annual salary for him being the monarch. And if you fast forward almost 300 years, we are a modern day iteration of an organisation that delivers a return to the UK Treasury. One hundred percent of our profit goes back to the UK Treasury for the benefit of the public purse.

We have a really broad range of assets. We have urban assets, which are primarily in the centre of London (we are really fortunate to own Regent Street and a big part of St. James’s). Then we also own 15 plus shopping centres across the UK. We also own a lot of what we call strategic land, which is land that has potential to be turned into communities and working with local authorities on their plans to build new and thriving communities. We are also a large holder of rural land, and we are the fifth largest rural landowner in the UK.

And then the area that’s not land based, which is intriguing and people often do not know this about us. We are responsible for the UK seabed for renewable energy and leasing the seabed for not just floating offshore wind and fixed offshore wind, but also carbon capture and storage for pipelines, cables, etc.

Tell us more about the purpose that drives the Crown Estate and how this informs your sustainability agenda?
Everything we do with those assets is about returning value to the country, it is hugely motivating and galvanising in terms of having a clear purpose to really guide us as an organisation.

If you take real estate for example, it accounts for around 40% of emissions – this has a very big impact on climate change. And like everybody else, we are looking at what we need to do to play our part in minimising the impact of our assets not just in the UK, but globally.

We constructed our sustainability activity so that we could really understand what net zero meant from our assets. We have a lot of what’s called heritage assets – these are buildings that were built over 100 years ago. A lot of them are protected and they don’t perform as well as they need to in an environment where we are looking to reduce energy intensity and looking to, when we do renovate them, do as much retrofitting as possible.

As a result, we have been actively seeking to understand what is the impact and how do we reduce the carbon. Historically we were not used to collecting such data and what started out as a sustainability journey to implement our net zero targets, quickly evolved into how do we run these assets more efficiently?

At the end of the day, it’s about reducing the amount of materials we are consuming. And this happens to be carbon and energy. So really having everybody who works in our property portfolio understand why that’s important, understand what each of us can do, understand how we use the equipment that we have put in place already to help drive that.

And then how do we work with customers so they see this as something they can be part of as well, as opposed to something the landlord is doing.

I would say our sustainability journey recently has been a learning curve just on improving our operational activity.

But I am pleased to say that we have made huge inroads in that, and the big focus now is how we activate our development pipeline, how do we really make sure that as we retrofit, as we have big developments coming online, how do we make sure that we are setting those up to perform in a way that really drives that activity well in the future. Some of it is technology based, but a lot of it is behaviour and culture based, and that’s probably the biggest lesson learnt.

Do you have any examples of quick wins that you have had so far whilst looking at those areas?
Good question. We have really spent quite a lot of time on bringing all our staff along on the net zero journey strategy – whether they are part of our supply chain or Crown Estate staff, so that they really understand its purpose and help unpack it to make it something they can relate to in what they do for the organisation.

For me it is a really big win when you have people coming up with ideas for how to really evolve the culture of the organisation, because I believe that’s how you get far greater and more effective traction long term.

What does good look like for the next 10 years for the Crown of States? What is the next big ambition?
What good looks like is that we have this phrase of “everything is connected”. We really want people to be thinking in systems and working in systems and being part of those in a way that we can help drive change.

So good looks like, whether it’s on the marine world, where we are looking to help to bring renewable energy to the UK and decarbonise the UK, but also energy security. And whether it’s on land in urban or rural communities, it is really about understanding ourselves as part of a bigger dynamic flourishing ecosystem. We can not do this alone, we need to be a connected community striving for unified goals.