Strategic Report

Looking forward

Our 2019/2024 strategy sets out our ambition of not only what we want to have delivered by 2024 but crucially how we deliver it. Our strategic objectives around delivering good services, providing decent homes and developing more homes are consistent with many housing associations; we want settle’s unique selling point to be how we deliver our services. This is about being a landlord that our customers trust and having services that are designed around good quality and feedback from engagement. It is also about ensuring that we continue to provide safe, secure and high-quality housing that remains genuinely affordable to people struggling to find a place to live.

Our colleagues are key to realising our ambition. They are passionate about our social purpose and ensuring we give something back to customers and communities. Together with listening to the voice of colleagues, what they see and hear will help underpin our continuous improvement of services.

We recognise that this is a difficult operating environment with amongst other things the impact of the war in Ukraine, specifically which has impacted on energy/commodity prices and therefore inflation, and the impact of supply chain pressures. Our risk assurance framework allows oversight of our ability to respond to this challenging and changing environment. We have sufficient financial capacity to meet these challenges and our long-term financial planning demonstrates that we will continue to operate with reasonable headroom above covenant levels.

Despite the changing economic environment, we continue to respond to the ongoing housing crisis, focusing on increasing the availability of affordable housing to try and meet demand. We continue to respond and adjust to changes in legislation relating to the safety and efficiency of homes as we work towards achieving an EPC-C for all properties by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

Delivering more homes

We recognise the important role we have to play in responding to the housing need across the localities in which we work. Our corporate plan sets out to deliver 1,500 homes by 2024 of which at least 90% are affordable. We ended the financial year 2021/22 having completed 30% of these homes, with a further 55% already committed to construction.

We are pleased to see the growing number of social rent homes coming through to completion, recognising acute affordability pressures in our operating geography. Through our shared ownership activity we supported over 120 households to realise their home ownership ambitions.

As a place-based business, we’re committed to providing good quality, sustainable homes in vibrant neighbourhoods. It's been a busy year rolling out our regeneration strategy, with active customer engagement shaping investment plans. At the end of 2021/22 the first homes in our £20m flagship project at John Barker Place in Hitchin are nearing completion and we’re excited to be welcoming residents into their new homes during the summer of 2022.

A well-run social business

Continuing to be a well-run social business remains a fundamental aspect of our strategy. This reflects three key areas of focus:

We will use our data on costs and performance to target year on year efficiencies to our cost base, with a clear focus on measuring and monitoring whether these efficiencies are realised.
We will continue to invest in customers’ homes, ensuring that our asset management programme is fully funded within our long-term business plan. This will ensure we continue to provide good homes that reflect the needs of customers.
Social purpose is at the core of settle. We are ambitious about running our business to produce sufficient levels of surplus to ensure we balance good services and new homes with delivering that social purpose.

Underlying our approach to running the business is a strong governance framework that gives us the confidence to deliver more. This is not simply about risk management or ensuring that our risk appetite statement underpins our approach to business activity; it is about being a regulated entity that has an effective internal control environment and the assurance that we are operating within our rules.

The funding environment continues to be borrower friendly, albeit with a forecasted rise in the cost of borrowing. Business’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials have also come into sharper focus and in order to remain attractive to investors, being able to demonstrate a clear commitment to investing in sustainability is becoming increasingly important. Our continued engagement with lenders and the recent successful completion of a £75m ESG linked Revolving Credit Facility demonstrate that there continues to be significant interest in debt issuance from settle.

Delivering good services

In 2021/22 we launched the Basically Brilliant programme, this unites all colleagues to deliver a relentless focus on getting the basics right and building positively on all aspects of our customers' interactions with settle. We want to ensure that great customer satisfaction can be achieved with minimal effort from the customer.

Over the year we have developed our new Neighbourhood Model, co-created with residents. This will help improve satisfaction with our neighbourhoods and build up our community resilience. We will be reporting progress on outcomes and delivery quarterly to the newly formed Operations Committee.

We have a fantastic offer to vulnerable customers through the delivery of settle plus and are working on the clear understanding of demand via our data insight.

We have increased resource in our Customer Service Centre and continue to improve performance around key metrics including first point of contact resolution, reduction in failure demand and call abandonment rate.

We know we can improve our digital offer and our objective is to have a great offer to customers with the focus on continued investment in self-serve automation development and digital enhancement to the customer portal, particularly the end-to-end repairs management.

We have launched our Voice of the Customer Panel; recruitment is planned for early summer with a view to holding the inaugural meeting in October 2022. The panel is a team of residents whose role it is to champion the voice of all settle customers with our board, including a focus on learning from complaints.

We are ahead of the timetable for embedding the Tenant Satisfaction Measure reporting and are testing the surveys out with our customers from July 2022.

We have invested in the customer resolution team and the outcomes are starting to show with performance at year-end only 3% off target. (87% of complaints were responded to within complaint handling code timescales, just 3% off the 90% year-end target). We continue to move to a more proactive service, evidencing we are learning and acting on feedback.

Developing a place where colleagues love to work

During 2021/22, we have continued to deliver excellent outcomes emanating from the delivery of our People strategy. Key outcomes include: