Providing safe, energy-efficient homes

We carried out about 10,000 stock condition surveys in 2023/24, compared with 5,100 the previous year, and more than double our original target of 4,500. As well as checking homes meet the Decent Homes Standard, surveys include a Housing Health and Safety Rating System assessment to identify damp and mould issues. They also help us plan our stock investment programmes. They include energy efficiency assessments, which support our drive to improve the sustainability of our homes.

We invested £109.2m (2022/23: £94.3m) in improving customers’ homes this year. Work included routine repairs and maintenance, cyclical decorations, replacing bathrooms, kitchens, windows and doors, installing new roofs, plus electrical and ‘business as usual’ building safety works.

This year, 98.3% (2022/23: 98.9%) of our homes met the Decent Homes Standard, with 30 (2022/23: 25) having outstanding HHSRS repair cases and 389 (2022/23: 317) having reported disrepairs on 31 March 2024. We’ve changed the way we report decency in recent years, including disrepairs and HHSRS cases (when they include damp and mould) in our calculations.

We’re investing more in our repairs service than ever before, to meet increased demand, rising costs and changes to our repair responsibilities. We spent £62.2m on repairs in 2023/24 (2022/23: £57.4m). In 2023/24, customer satisfaction with repairs improved slightly to 77.6% (2022/23: 76.6%) and satisfaction with Hyde tradespeople remained very high, at about 95%. We expect response times, quality and customer satisfaction to continue to improve due to the changes we’re making.

We continued to bring more repairs and maintenance services in-house this year, to gain more control over timescales and ensure a consistent high quality of work. In October 2023, 62 operatives and support staff joined Hyde after our contract with Equans ended. We now have more than 300 directly-employed colleagues carrying out repairs and maintenance of about 30,000 homes – or 95% of the 31,000 homes we’re responsible for maintaining.

We received 2,225 reports of damp and mould in 2023/24, compared with 1,364 in 2022/23, with a peak in winter months. We completed 76% of work orders (2022/23: 93%) raised in 2023/24 by the end of the financial year. Despite the increase in reports, the number of days it takes us to complete a damp and mould repair is 19 days, down from 22.6 days in 2022/23.

More than 100 contractors and consultants signed up to the Greener Future Partnership’s (GFP) seven-year framework to deliver work supported by the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF). We’re one of the founder partners of the GFP.

GFP successfully bid for £40.4m from the SHDF in 2022/23, to part-fund £95m investment in retrofitting 5,500 homes over the next two years. We’ll receive about £6m, which we’ll match fund, to retrofit about 950 homes across Chichester in 2024/25.

Building safety work this year has included communal and flat door checks in buildings more than 11m high and carrying out Fire Risk Appraisals of External Walls (FRAEW) in Higher Risk Buildings (HRBs). These buildings are at least 18m, or seven storeys high, and which have at least two homes, or that are care homes.

We also completed remedial works at Gary Court, in Croydon, at four blocks at Propeller Crescent and Purley Way in Waddon, and a block at Millard Road in Deptford. Three of six phases of remediation at the Packington Estate in Islington were also finished this year. We received some funding from the Building Safety Fund to cover some of the costs of remedial works to our leaseholders and shared owners.