A warm welcome
Welcome to our annual report for residents 2018/19, where you can find out how we did against our targets, our performance and achievements over the last financial year, from April 2018 to March 2019. This year, we worked with some of our local panel members to ensure this report includes the information you would want to read.
It’s been a good year for us - we’ve seen our overall customer satisfaction increase to 88.3% bringing us close to achieving our target of 90% and resident satisfaction with overall repairs reached 82.8%, against a target of 85%. We’ll continue to build on improving our customer services and repairs service so we get closer and hopefully achieve our targets in these areas next year.
We’ve also exceeded our targets in some other areas which is great and something we’ll aim to keep doing next year. Resident satisfaction with new home re-lets was 92% against a target of 82%; Rent arrears was 3.96% against our target of 4.25%, and we resolved 83.5% of enquiries at first contact which is above our target of 80%!
In 2018, we updated our four strategic objectives to reflect the changing external environment; things like Brexit, government policy and Universal Credit all affect how we work so it’s important we can adapt.
Here we’ve set out our updated targets to achieve by 2023 alongside our strategic objectives and the progress we’ve made towards achieving them this year. Our strategic objectives are important for guiding the work we do as a charitable housing association.
Maximising growth within our resources
We must do everything we can to help solve the housing crisis and provide homes for people who are unable to rent or buy on the expensive open markets.
Ambition – build 5,000 new homes in five years
Progress – in 2018/19 we built
776
homes; we have 3,000 more in the pipeline
Delivering first class customer service
It’s important that we provide the highest level of service to our customers all the time. We have five guiding principles for our service so we achieve this. They are: the right culture; an accessible service; a more personalised service; a high quality service; and an added value service.
Ambition – Achieve 90% overall customer satisfaction
Progress – 2018/19 satisfaction
88.3%
Building a great organisation
We know customer satisfaction depends on us having talented and ambitious people with a shared vision to be a leading housing provider. To achieve this, we need to recruit and invest in our employees as we know a great team is essential to us providing a great service.
Ambition – Become a Sunday Times Best 100 Company to work for
Progress – Made 39th best not for profit company to work for in 2018
Achieved!
Increasing financial strength
We need to be financially strong to deliver on our ambitious growth plans, to fund improvements in our infrastructure and resources to achieve our customer service objective, and to meet our increased costs on our homes in response to the concerns raised by the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
Ambition – reach 35% operating margin on core social housing business
Progress – 2018/19 social housing operating margin*
28.6%
*Social housing surplus measures the amount of money left over from renting our social housing homes after we’ve taken into account the cost of management and maintenance. The social housing operating surplus as a % of total social housing income is called social housing operating margin. The higher operating margin, the better!
Awards and accreditations
We are an award-winning housing association and build award-winning homes. These are a few of the awards we won during 2018/19:
