Building safety and quality

The safety of our customers is our main priority. To underline this, as of 31 March 2023, our gas safety and fire risk compliance stood at 99.98 percent and 99.74 percent respectively. The quality of our homes is of key importance, and we’re pleased to say that 99.7 percent of our properties meet the Decent Homes Standard. We completed a significant programme of major works throughout the 2022/23 financial year. This was achieved against a backdrop of challenging external factors for the housing and repairs sector. These challenges, which resulted from Brexit and were perpetuated during the Covid-19 pandemic, led to difficulties with sourcing labour and materials, and made it extremely hard to find contractors who could complete work to the required standard. The Group submitted an application to the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) in Autumn 2022. The application was successful, with £6m of funding secured from the SHDF. We’ll spend a total of £14m upgrading 600 homes over the next two years. It’s important to say that our housing stock is comprised predominately of low-level family homes and that none of our properties currently have any required remedial fire safety work linked to cladding.