Value for Money

The housing regulator in England, the Regulator of Social Housing, requires housing providers to articulate and deliver a comprehensive approach to achieving value for money. This is to take account of the corporate objectives, along with the interests and commitments we share with our stakeholders.

This means managing resources economically, efficiently and effectively to provide quality services and homes, and delivering year-on-year improvements in value for money.

We are focused on providing good value for money. Our customers want good-quality homes and services but expect us to be as efficient and effective as possible to keep costs down.

In order to inform and involve tenants, we give frequent updates on our website and in our Tenant Annual Reviews to show how we are using our resources to provide services.

We want customers to be able to see how we manage performance and how our Tenant Scrutiny Panel helps us to raise standards.

Our value-for-money self-assessment gives our stakeholders a rounded picture of how we have performed against our VFM targets for 2023/24, how we have progressed since last year and how we intend to deliver VFM in the future.

We report on the metrics prescribed by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) in its VFM Standard 2018.

We also report on some of our additional metrics. We are confident that we have fully complied with this VFM Standard.

The board is committed to ensuring that VFM is embedded in both our culture and decision-making processes.

In 2023/24, we focused on maximising our resources through smart financial management and strategic investments.

Key highlights:

• We effectively managed arrears, beating our target of 4.7 by 0.1%.
• We re-procured contracts worth £41.9 million, which saved us £0.2 million and improved services for our tenants.
• We invested £40 million in new properties, below our target of £41 million, and secured £7 million in grants to deliver 164 new rental units consisting of 76 general needs, 59 shared ownership, and 29 specialised supported housing. Of these units, 114 were delivered through Section 106.
• We approved an investment of £69.7 million over 5 years to deliver an average of 2,100 components (e.g. bathrooms and kitchens) each year.
• In 2023/24, we spent £10.1 million on replacing 1,880 components including kitchens, bathrooms, fire doors, rewires, lifts and commercial boilers, slightly below our target of £10.6 million, but still a significant investment.
• We maintained a strong operating margin of 12.3%, which despite being slightly lower than our target of 14.6%, we expect to grow by 3.9% over the next 5 years.