Winning The William Sutton Prize: a platform for real change
Sam Jones, Founding Director at The Green Partnership, and Dr Gemma Jerome, Head of Green Infrastructure at Sintali, receiving their William Sutton Prize trophy.
By Sam Jones, Founding Director at The Green Partnership, and Dr Gemma Jerome, Head of Green Infrastructure at Sintali
As sector leads in environmental consultancy, and built and natural environment certification, The Green Partnership (TGP) and Sintali have come together to create a dynamic partnership in response to an identified gap for a tool that will guide better stewardship of green and blue infrastructure across the built environment, and in turn, support placemakers and home builders to more effectively deliver homes and places that work for people and wildlife.
Given that Clarion Housing Group is the UK’s largest provider of affordable housing, it made good sense for us to seek support from an industry leader and apply for The William Sutton Prize. The prestigious William Sutton Prize has a strong track record in turning ambitious ideas into practical, and truly sustainable, solutions. In an age characterised by uncertainty – with climate, nature and wellbeing at the top of organisations’ risk registers – we knew that forging a collaboration with such a trusted voice in the built environment sector would serve our mission perfectly.
We believe that our success in 2023 reflects the fact that our proposal, addressing the need for neighbourhoods that support residents’ wellbeing, without compromising the quality of the natural environment, was an immediate good fit for The William Sutton Prize’s purpose to create lasting benefits for the built environment and local communities.
The way we care for our green and blue spaces has a direct impact on both people and nature. Well-managed landscapes don’t just support biodiversity—they enhance community wellbeing, improve resilience to climate change, and create healthier, more sustainable places to live. Yet, in a fast-changing regulatory landscape, many sectors struggle to take a long-term, strategic approach to managing these vital spaces.
Dr Gemma Jerome and Sam Jones celebrating their William Sutton Prize win.
As we know, the dial is turning towards more responsible, landscape-focused decision-making at the planning stage of development, with all new places in England mandated to evidence the benefits they will bring to nature through a Biodiversity Net Gain accreditation. Our stewardship framework and accreditation will pick up where this legislative approach leaves off – ensuring that those gains for nature, and in turn for people, are deliverable, and long-lasting.
Moreover, as our understanding of “what good looks like” is constantly evolving, we are committed to creating a solution that stakeholders can continue to rely on for years to come. The joint learning offered by The Green Partnership (TGP) and Sintali, as experts in green space stewardship and certification respectively, will provide the intelligence to deliver a smart and adaptive solution. Our ambition is to create an evidence-based, practical and accessible methodology to measure, deliver and monitor the quality of green infrastructure stewardship. This will be translated into a formal Standards Framework and Accreditation Scheme to ensure implementation quality is monitored over time and actors involved in the process are duly recognised for their work in effective stewardship.
So far, The William Sutton Prize has enabled us to fund a deep dive into the market to understand what products and services currently exist, and where critical gaps remain. The funding has afforded us the valuable time and expertise to prepare these initial findings and will in turn ensure that we do not frustrate the market by replicating existing interventions. However, the Prize has provided much more than financial support and additional resource. The way it has been structured has given us unprecedented access to Clarion’s leadership team, who have been instrumental in shaping and strengthening the project - they have provided invaluable insight, problem-solving support, and signposting through regular engagement with senior leaders and technical experts. This has helped refine our approach, stress-test our thinking, and accelerate the impact we aim to deliver.
In 2025, we will launch a series of pilot projects to ensure our beta-solutions work in real-world applications. Clarion is actively contributing sites and communities to the pilot programme, allowing us to develop our interventions across diverse settings. This beta-testing is critical in verifying our approach, ensuring that we have confidence our solutions are fit for purpose, market-ready, and will help to set a new benchmark for stewardship in the built environment.
For those considering applying for the Prize in 2025, our advice is this: approach it as more than just a funding opportunity. See it as a chance to stress-test your ideas with industry leaders, build lasting partnerships, and ultimately, accelerate the real-world impact of your work.
We are proud to be part of The William Sutton Prize community, and we can’t wait to see how the next generation of winners continues to innovate, disrupt, empower, push boundaries and drive positive change.