HM Land Registry - UK
Thanks to a strategy to work with staff and make adjustments to working practices, HM Land Registry’s Telford Office is leading the way in the UK branch of the Horizon 2020 funded Save@Work competition, aiming to reduce the amount of energy wasted by offices in the public sector. Part of this undertaking involved making savings with our ICT equipment’s energy use and talking to staff about their monitors and how much of an impact seemingly small changes can have if we all make them.
By drawing up and implementing an action plan as well as engaging positively with staff, Telford has reduced its electricity use over the previous year by 16.4%. Discussing the energy used by monitors with staff resulted in a reduction from 14% of monitors left on when not in use to 5%, which contributed to a 40% reduction in the office’s electricity consumption in December 2016 compared to December 2015. Writing an article for staff about the positive impacts of each of us making small changes caught the attention of a wider audience and may be adopted as ‘Best Practice’ throughout all HM Land Registry offices. Running a monthly competition with prizes for the team that have the fewest monitors left on standby has increased engagement, participation and goodwill amongst our colleagues in the office. Average CO2 emissions during the competition have reduced by 270 KG per employee, which equates to an average energy saving of 800 kWh per employee so far and the savings are still increasing.
We saw monitors around the office were being left on standby. We highlighted this to staff and requested that they start to switch off monitors when not in use. We got a question about how much energy it would really save – ‘is it worth it?’ This was a good question that deserved an answer, so we decided to work it out. As we suspected, the energy saved when turning off a monitor was minimal. Instead of thinking ‘why bother?’, we considered the matter on a larger scale, and this was the perspective from which we wrote the article – turning off monitors won’t win the competition, but it illustrated the point the competition was making – small changes made by many people do make a difference.
The Save@Work competition draws to a close at the end of February and we are looking to continue the positive habits we have implemented during the year beyond this and into the future. We will continue to communicate and engage with our colleagues to help make all our offices more sustainable for the future, as well as looking for more changes, small or large, to cut carbon and save energy. We will work with sustainability champions across HMLR, as well as other government departments such as Natural England (DEFRA) to push sustainable working and climate change to the top of the agenda.