Report and Consolidated Financial Statements
As we started this fifteen-month period* in January 2023, inflation had reached an all-time high at 10.5%, and the sustained increase in day to day living costs is continuing to affect our residents and shared homeowners. Despite the challenging operating environment, we end the year having maintained operating margin, good customer satisfaction levels and mid or upper quartile Tenant Satisfaction Measures.
Highlights from 2023/24 include:
- We delivered in line with our budgets and plans achieving an Operating Surplus of £9.2m from Turnover £64.5m, delivering an operating social housing margin 25.3% and Gearing 41.1%.
- Our overall feedback score was 4.3 out of 5 (compared to 4.3 in 2022). This measures repairs, antisocial behaviour, making a complaint, calling our customer services team, moving into a home, and buying a shared ownership home.
- Achieving arrears of 3.38% (compared to 2.17% in 2022 and sector average 3.5%) against a continuing cost-of-living crisis.
- Supporting 4,809 people with our communities work (compared to 4,775 in 2022) including: 1,189 support interventions to help sustain tenancies, 271 residents received help from our employment and training services that supported 65 people into employment, another 114 into training and 15 gaining work experience.
- Achieving 93.4% overall jobs on time (compared to 89% last year), maintaining good building safety compliance performance, initiating further improvements for our voids management to address the higher number of voids and level of works needed reflected in the 52-day time to let (compared with 63 last year).
- Introducing a pro-active surveying programme identifying households more likely to experience damp and mould and a dedicated fuel efficiency adviser role. In response to our campaign raising awareness with our residents about how to manage damp and mould we have worked with households to tackle the underlying property failings. The analysis of household data has been invaluable and allowed us to identify 70 vulnerable residents who had not previously contacted us, where we have been able to make improvements to the living conditions of 50 residents.
- Increasing our homes in management by 327 new builds, achieving £14m sales revenue through the sale of 130 shared ownership homes (against the target of £12.9m for 123 homes). We end the year with 297 new homes in construction or contract.
- Successfully refinancing £399m of our borrowing, improving the loan covenant terms and securing within this £175m of new loan facilities.
Read our full Annual Report and Financial Statements here
Footnote: This report covers a fifteen-month period as we have changed our financial year end from December to March. This will bring some administrative efficiencies for us and make it easier to compare our performance to others in the sector.