Strategic Report

Our corporate plan sets out our ambition, not only for what we want to have delivered by 2024 but crucially how we deliver it.

Our strategic objectives of delivering good services, providing quality homes, and developing more homes are consistent with many housing associations but here at settle our unique selling point is how we deliver our services. This is about being a landlord that our customers trust. It is about listening to our customers, having effective engagement, receiving feedback, and designing our products and services with the customer at the heart of them. It is 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. Listening to the voice of colleagues, together with what they see and hear helps underpin our continuous improvement of services.

settle's Group Structure

Our governance structure remains simple and provides a clear line of sight from the Board to the subsidiary, Rowan Homes (NHH) Limited. The subsidiary Board members are drawn from the group Board, and this ensures that its activities support settle's objectives.

The group is known as settle and consists of:

settle Group – the asset holding Housing Association and group parent. It is registered as a Co-operative and Community Benefit Society and Registered Provider of Social Housing with the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH);
Rowan Homes (NHH) Limited (RHL) – a wholly owned company limited by shares. RHL’s purpose is to develop new housing properties for outright sale and any profits are distributed to settle.

settle

settle Group

co-operative and community benefit society and registered housing provider

Rowan Homes (NHH) Limited

private company limited by shares

Regulation

We are regulated by the Regulator of Social Housing and maintain the highest grade for governance, G1, and V2 for financial viability under the regulator’s Governance and Financial Viability Standard. We are also overseen by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

Board and Committee Structure

Our Board and Committees at settle are crucial to setting the strategic direction of the group and monitoring performance. Board and Committee membership is based on skills and knowledge. We have adopted the National Housing Federation’s Code of Governance 2020, and the Board annually review their effectiveness and skills. The settle Governance Framework in 2022/23 included four Committees of the Board, a Task and Finish Group, Operating Regulations, Financial Regulations, and a Schedule of Delegated Authority. Following recommendations from the review of settle Board’s effectiveness carried out by Campbell Tickell in the spring of 2021, the Board approved and implemented the agreed changes to the governance framework including a re-constituted Committee structure, each with delegated responsibilities set out in Terms of Reference and supporting the work of the Board:

Audit and Risk Committee;
Development and Asset Committee (formerly Development Committee);
Nominations and Remuneration Committee (formerly People and Governance Committee);
Operations Committee; and
Treasury Task and Finish Group

The Audit and Risk Committee: provides an assurance function of risk management and internal control and reviews the work of the internal and external auditors. This includes review, scrutiny, and constructive challenge in relation to external audit, internal audit, effectiveness of internal controls via ‘deep dives’, whistleblowing, fraud, financial reporting, risk appetite, strategy and management, complaints, and other related matters. The Committee also reviews the audited financial statements and recommends them to the Board for approval. The Committee reports annually to the Board on its work and conclusions.

The Development and Asset Committee: considers and makes recommendations to the Board on major proposals relating to property and land transactions in the context of settle’s development and regeneration strategy and approves development and sales activities between Board-agreed thresholds. Incorporation of asset matters into the Committee’s remit takes effect from the beginning of the 2023/24 financial year, with the Committee now also responsible for overseeing and advising the Board on the strategic direction of the asset management and investment strategy, asset acquisition and disposal (including regeneration), and monitoring investment in settle’s assets. The Committee’s monitoring of internal controls and risk has been widened to include consideration of risks associated with the planned maintenance programme, alongside strategic development risk and risk management of the development programme.

The Nominations and Remuneration Committee: continues to consider settle’s People strategy, remuneration, including executive pay, employee pay awards, pensions arrangements and Board and committee remuneration, and support the Board in reviewing the effectiveness of the governance arrangements of the organisation. The Terms of Reference are, however, more detailed on remuneration matters, and ‘nominations’ matters, such as Board membership, tenure, and succession planning.

The Operations Committee: was introduced into settle’s Committee framework to support the Board in ensuring effective oversight and assurance of the delivery of operational plans, services to customers and feedback from residents. Responsibilities are to monitor and consider the risks facing front line delivery in relation to core affordable, landlord services, and to ensure the Board has assurance regarding the impact that the core affordable landlord service and the activity of settle has on local operating areas.

The settle Board also convenes a Treasury Task and Finish Group on an ad hoc basis to support the Board on the delivery of the treasury strategy.

The Board agreed new Terms of Reference for each Committee, and each Committee reported regularly to the Board during the year on how it discharges its functions. In September 2022, the Board also reviewed and updated its Operating Regulations and the matters reserved for Board decision that cannot be delegated.

Purpose

Our purpose at settle is the reason that the organisation exists. It sits at the core of what we do and drives our decisions and actions.

Everything we do places the resident at the heart of our work and goes toward improving the communities we work in, whether that is by assisting residents to get the best services and support, building new homes, investing in current properties or helping to create neighbourhoods that residents can feel proud to live in.

Corporate Strategy and Strategic Objectives

Our 2019-2024 corporate strategy sets out our ambition and strategic objectives. We are in the final year of delivering this plan and despite an extremely challenging external operating environment, we remain focused on achieving our objectives and ensuring we are getting the basics right.

To maximise our delivery against our purpose, we have four strategic objectives:

Delivering good services – delivering on our commitment to be Basically Brilliant, getting the basics right day in day out, being known for good customer service and using data insight together with resident feedback;
Delivering more homes – playing our part in solving the housing crisis through the development of affordable homes across a range of tenures in our locality;
A well-run social business – ensuring that we maximise our financial capacity whilst continuing to ensure that we remain stable and viable as well as being a partner of choice to our stakeholders; and
Being a place where colleagues love to work – to be the ‘go to’ place to work in our geographic area.

As a well-run business, we remain financially strong and stable. Our risk assurance framework allows oversight of our ability to respond to the 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.

Our Annual Delivery Plan (ADP), agreed with the Board, provides focus, and is measured on an ongoing basis. We continue to provide services that meet customers’ needs by adopting flexible, creative, and intuitive way of working. During the past year we have delivered a range of achievements across our key strategic objectives:

Delivering good services

We have continued to focus on embedding our Basically Brilliant programme, with a relentless focus on getting the basics right across the organisation 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, and Basically Brilliant is integral to this.

We have also continued our focus on working in partnership with residents and local stakeholders in our largest neighbourhoods - rolling out our neighbourhood plans and co-creating solutions with residents, with a focus in particular on building up community resilience.

We continue to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard throughout our work; that we provide multiple opportunities for residents to provide feedback and that we provide services that customers value, based on what we learn through data and engagement.

As important parts of this, colleagues across settle including members of our Board and Executive Team have continued to take part in our Big Door Knock every few months, and our Voice of the Resident Panel is now in place.

To ensure we continue to deliver services that meet our residents’ expectations, we also began early surveys against the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures. The first surveys went to residents in August.

We report progress on outcomes and delivery quarterly to the Board Operations Committee. Highlights across the year include:

Over the last six months 69% of customers scored very satisfied, or satisfied, with settle as a landlord. A further 14% said they thought we were ok. This meant that 83% of customers were satisfied, or ok with settle. We also measure the trust customers have in us as a business and this year achieved a score of 7.4 which is upper quartile performance within public sector organisations.
Resident feedback shaping improvements to delivery of our housing support and customer service centre functions, merging these into a new ‘service hub’, which went live in December 2022 and is better able to deliver a first time fix underpinned by faster response times to calls and emails and increased functionality of digital services. We started to see the improvements the new model has brought in the final quarter of 2022/23 and have confidence this will continue to improve the service residents get at the first point of contact in the year ahead.
Feedback influencing the partnerships and support we have in place to help residents, including those who are more vulnerable. This has of course included a focus on supporting residents through cost of living challenges, which has in turn helped residents to be able to pay their rent. We achieved arrears levels of 2.7% for the year, under the target set as well as the median level across the sector.

Throughout the year, we have continued to work hard to ensure we respond to complaints quickly, putting things right and learning from when things have gone wrong. We have seen performance continue to improve throughout the year, achieving 100% responses within target timeframes for the final quarter of the year.

Delivering more homes

As a regionally focused housing provider we understand the housing needs of our local communities and our development pipeline is focused on meeting those needs. We are building an increasing number of social rented homes to address the affordability issues many of our customers face.

In common with all other housing associations we have faced challenges due to global supply chain issues and the impact of inflation. Despite this, during the past year we delivered 278 homes , including 62 homes developed in 2021/22 where customers were able to move in during 2022/23, and one commercial unit. This represents the highest number of new affordable homes we have completed in one year.

We remain committed to increasing the supply of affordable homes in the areas in which we work. In agreement with our Board we are being more agile about our housing targets and this year are working to a target of completing 230 new homes, with at least 90% of these to be affordable. This continues to increase on the number of new homes we have delivered in recent years, as well as ensuring we do so in a financially responsible way.

We continue our focus on regeneration to improve the quality of housing in our local area, providing options both for rent and for home ownership through a growing shared ownership programme. As part of this, we are delighted that last summer, residents moved into Kingfisher House, the first phase of our regeneration programme at John Barker Place in Hitchin.

A well-run social business

Continuing to be a well-run social business remains a fundamental aspect of our strategy. Having a strong governance and internal control framework gives us the confidence to act and deliver on our commitments. We have effective risk management and ensure that our risk appetite statement underpins our approach to business activity but for settle being a well-run business is more; it is about being a regulated entity that has an effective internal control environment and the assurance that we are operating within our rules. 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 our assets, 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 run our business to produce sufficient levels of surplus to ensure we balance good services and new homes with delivering that social purpose.

Developing a place where colleagues love to work

We have continued to deliver excellent outcomes emanating from the delivery of our People strategy. Key outcomes include:

Colleague engagement – through our engagement surveys and colleague groups we ensure everyone has a voice at settle, our result of 8.3 shows the strength of our culture; that we have strong engagement from colleagues and alignment with our values and behaviours.
Performance management – clear framework in place linked to our values and behaviours which has been demonstrated through performance improvements for residents.
Reward and recognition – supportive approach which has been adapted this year to support colleagues through the cost-of-living crisis.
Roll out of our settle way playbook which articulates who we are at settle and why settle is a great place to work for existing and new colleagues.
Continued focus on equality, diversity and inclusion, supported by our value everyone colleague group, working to ensure everyone feels valued and included in the organisation.