Annabel Gray

Annabel heads up our Sustainability Services, working with clients to support them to understand and rise to the key challenges in becoming a sustainable business. Annabel works with Boards, Executive Teams and delivery teams to provide proactive, practical and expert advice on the full range of climate conscious initiatives, relevant to the housing sector. This includes working to ensure that a ‘Sustainability Golden Thread’ runs right through the organisation – linking strategy with the operational delivery of programmes and specific activities.  

Expertise

Programme & project management, net zero and decarbonisation strategy & change, ESG, affordable housing, environmental accreditations, environmental resilience, carbon accounting, stakeholder management, development delivery and public sector procurement. 

About Annabel

Annabel is a PRINCE2® qualified Project Director and Practitioner of IEMA, specialising in environmental transformation, regeneration, and housing delivery. 

Annabel has over 12 years’ experience in delivering a variety of projects and programmes across the public and private sector. She has built up a strong set of project management skills, namely stakeholder management, risk management, change management, financial management, project governance and reporting.  Annabel has a track record navigating the corporate landscape to design and implement housing and environmental sustainability transformation programmes.   

She routinely delivers a high-quality set of outputs on schedule and within budget to high client satisfaction. Annabel has refined written and communication skills essential for managing key stakeholder relationships. She is hard working, conscientious and an enthusiastic person who thrives on producing exceptional results. 

Recent Altair Assignments

St Arthur, net zero strategic direction setting (Project Director) 2023 

• Prepared a board level briefing report designed to educate and upskill the board on net zero sector legislation & policy at macro and micro level, competitor activity, opportunities of proactive net zero action, climate related risk exposure, guidance on suggest strategic aims and objectives. 

Thrive, Sustainability net zero strategy development (Critical friend) 2022-ongoing 

• Supporting the client to prepare their net zero and wider sustainability strategy and embed the golden thread throughout other strategic documents.  Involved scoping the strategy, identifying emission hotspots, designing a roadmap to net zero and an action plan. 
• Oversaw calculations of their baseline carbon footprint. 

Cornwall Housing, Air source heat pump remediation (Project Director) 2022-23 

• Oversaw delivery of investigations into properties where ASHPs had been installed, without any other retrofit works, potentially putting tenant’s into a worse of situation with energy bills. 
• Project involved undertaking desktop analysis of housing stock data, on-site surveys and investigations, modelling retrofit strategies in SAP, data analysis, preparation of recommended next steps and presentation back to client. 

Abri, Carbon budgeting and accounting framework design (Project Director) 2022 

• Designed a bespoke carbon budgeting framework to support the implementation of Abri’s strategic objective of delivering year on year carbon reductions to achieve a net zero status by 2030. 
• Embedded the carbon budgeting procedures into the financial governance structure and procedures to ensure both budgets were cognisant of one another. 
• Delineated the carbon budgets against the financial budgets. 
• Facilitated  several client workshops to refine the development of the framework and run training for the client team to support them in future business wide roll out. 
• Created procedural guidance and process maps specific to the Abri Sustainability team and the responsibilities of the wider organisation.  Guidance was developed for key stages; setting the carbon budget, obtaining corporate approval, monitoring and reporting on progress. 

Greener Future Partnerships (GFP), Energy Efficiency Review (Project Director) 2021  

• GFP is a partnership of HA organisations namely Abri, Anchor, Home Group, Hyde Group and Sanctuary. 
• Undertook research on behalf of GFP to challenge the hypothesis that SAP is the best method of assessing the energy efficiency of their existing housing stock. 
• Carried out a deep-dive assessment inclusive of interviews with experts inside and outside the sector. 
• Undertook a pilot study to assess how various amendments to the application of the SAP methodology and application of data could strengthen the accuracy of the SAP outputs. 
• The research resulted in the preparation of a refined methodology for calculating energy efficiency, and a final recommendation report for the GFP to implement across their organisations to help ensure consistency in approach.  This research was used to support the future roll out of Social Housing Decarbonisation funded schemes. 

Falkirk Council, Carbon Budgeting (Project Manager) 2021  

• Advising the Council to create a framework and guidance for setting year on year carbon budgets. 
• The framework will integrate with both the capital and revenue financial reporting and decision-making processes to help ensure equal consideration of carbon budgeting requirements when key decisions and expenditure are approved. 
• The framework is inclusive of organisational transformations which are required in respect of the Council’s policies, procedures, resources, and skills to aid successful implementation of carbon budgets. 
• Liaised with a variety of stakeholders such as finance, the climate change team, development, capital projects, and education to ensure the framework aligns with the requirements of core service areas. 

Background

• Level 3 Award in Introduction to Domestic Retrofit 
• PRINCE2® Foundation 

• Practitioner of the Institute for Environmental Management & Assessment 
• University of Southampton – Environmental Science BSc (Hons)  

Fun Facts

Outside of work Annabel enjoys playing sports such as tennis and golf.  More recently Annabel has taken up running and boxing in an attempt to keep fit and keep the pounds off as a keen cook and foodie!