We have announced another year of strong financial and sustainability performance with increased turnover, operating surplus and customer satisfaction. 

Our unaudited results for the 2023-24 financial year show turnover rose to £314m (2023: £290m), of which £267m came from its core business of social housing lettings (2023: £239m). Operating surplus (excluding asset sales) grew to £95m (2023: £91m), while surplus after tax (excluding fair value gains) rose to £67m (2023: £64m). And we once again recorded an operating margin on social housing lettings of 34% (2023: 34%). 

During the year we completed 1,191 new homes (2023: 1,265), all of which were for affordable tenures, including 551 for social rent (2023: 554). Our in-house construction team were responsible for delivering one in eight of the total completions. This figure is set to increase over the years ahead as we completed several land purchases over the past 12 months, including a site for more than 200 homes at Matson in Gloucestershire.  

Chief executive Robert Nettleton said: “Despite persistently high cost inflation, which has had a material impact on many of our customers, and a government-imposed rent cap, we have maintained our key financial metrics and credit ratings. This has enabled us to develop new homes at scale, as we delivered 1,191 affordable homes in the year and continued to secure our pipeline for the years ahead.” 

Chief finance officer Paul Walsh added: “We are pleased to report another strong set of financial results. We are determined to provide homes that our customers are proud to live in whilst remaining committed to financial discipline.  

“Total turnover exceeded £300m in the year with 85% coming from our core business of social housing. We are pleased to have delivered a social housing operating margin of 34%, maintaining our performance from the previous year and continuing to deliver sector-leading performance.” 

Director of treasury Imran Mubeen explained we have continued to unlock our balance sheet capacity, delivering new funding to finance our development and sustainability programmes. He said: 

“We delivered £150m of new drawn funding, as we co-created a new pathway to funding with Legal and General Investment Management to raise £50m, and then returned to the traditional private placement market to secure a further £100m with North American and UK investors. We also expanded our portfolio of revolving credit facilities to £450m across six funders, all linked to our sustainability golden metrics. We continue to pioneer sustainable finance in our sector and our portfolio now includes the first loans linked to reducing our Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions, improving our customer advocacy and actioning our outstanding repairs.” 

The trading update reported our performance against all of its sustainability golden metrics, highlighting the ones linked to its sustainability linked loans. The report revealed we have reduced our gender pay gap to 3.8% (2023: 6.5%), increased the number of homes with an EPC C rating or above to 89% (2023: 87%) and increased customer advocacy to 91% (2023: 83%).  

However, we missed our targets to coach 100 customers into employment or training and to reduce colleague sick days to 8.5 days. Imran added: “Our sustainability golden metrics were developed to ensure our ESG performance is reported with more visibility, more transparency and more accountability. We have fallen short against some of our targets this year which we report openly in this update, and which affirms the stretching nature of our sustainability linked loans. Importantly, our open approach to tracking and reporting our performance enables us to embed key learnings into our delivery model for next year.”   

The trading update also included details of our performance against some of the key Tenant Satisfaction Measures. Overall customer satisfaction over the year was at 85%, while 91% of customers say their home is safe and 91% say they are treated fairly and with respect. We'll be reporting our full performance against the measures in June.

Chief customer officer Paul Coates said: “We welcome the introduction of the Tenant Satisfaction Measures which allow the regulator and importantly our customers to hold us to account against our delivery. In our first year of data collection we have benchmarked our performance against our peer group and are pleased to have delivered top-quartile performance against key measures. 

“We will continue to invest in our homes and enhance our customer experience through our newly-launched asset management system which will deliver a more efficient and more responsive service.” 

Looking ahead, director of development Amanda Swann explained that we are continuing to invest in delivering new homes for future customers to meet the demand for affordable housing in our operating area. 

“We have ambitious future development aspirations, and plan to deliver circa 11,000 new low carbon homes by 2032, focusing on affordable tenures to support our core business,” she said. “We continue to leverage £240m of grant funding through wave two of our strategic partnership with Homes England."

Read our trading update for the year to March 2024

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