Our financial performance

Our focused strategy, management discipline and business resilience enabled us to continue our commitment to investing in services and putting our customers first, as we navigated the ongoing financial challenges in the social housing sector this year.

This strong financial performance demonstrates our capacity to remain resilient and adapt effectively in a difficult environment. We have a well-established build and sales programme that helps us continue to provide new homes while mitigating our exposure to market risks.

Highlights

  • Core operating surplus of £64.6m (2022/23: £57.4m)
  • Core operating margin of 21.1% (2022/23: 20.2%)
  • Net assets of £802.2m (2022/23: £786.3m).
  • Core operating business

    Our core operating business improved this year, with an increased margin of 21.1% from 20.2% in 2022/23, and a surplus of £64.6m (2022/23: £57.4m), despite ongoing inflation and regulatory demands, which has increased costs, while most of our rental income was capped by the rent settlement. This improved performance was driven largely by us being more efficient, which allowed us to increase our investment in customers’ homes and services.

  • Building safety

    Our building safety spend has reduced over time, as we took quick action following the Grenfell tragedy in 2017. We’ve also successfully worked with our contractors, who’ve carried out significant remediation works at their own cost. As a result, we only spent £2.2m on building safety projects this year (2022/23: £6.7m) and received £2.6m in grants and money recovered from contractors (2022/23: £17.0m).

  • Development and joint ventures

    Total surplus from development and joint ventures was £4.8m (2022/23: £8.0m) and £1.2m (2022/23: £5.1m), respectively. This reduction was driven by phasing of our development programme and a softening of the market. To mitigate higher interest rates and the market affordability challenges, we flexed the tenures of the homes we built between outright sale and shared ownership. This resulted in a lower sales surplus but we preserved the longer-term value of our shared ownership homes.

  • Housing property sales

    Disposals of homes (and related costs) include staircasing sales of shared ownership homes, disposals of empty homes no longer meeting customers’ needs and other asset sales, such as sales of homes to our strategic partnerships. Our total surplus of £46.0m (2022/23: £38.9m) was driven by two large sales to our investment partners (£4.4m), our void disposals programme (£34.1m) and other sales and related costs including staircasing and right to buy & acquire (£7.5m).