Across the Board – February 2025 update

The latest update from our Chair, Diane French, about the February board meeting.

At this time of year, as we approach the financial year end and the start of a new one, we have a series of board meetings.

Firstly in February we look at a draft budget and set of plans and then in March we meet again to sign these off.

Diane French, Chair

This year, as you can imagine, a lot of our conversation in February was about inflation and cost pressures. We have to balance our desire to be an ambitious organisation – wanting to set and meet high standards of service to our customers – with our need to demonstrate financial sustainability, meet high regulatory standards, and respond to the climate emergency and decarbonise. We also need to ensure we’re paying our staff a fair wage which motivates excellence and retains experience.

We were aided in these discussions by a refresh of our risk framework and thinking about our risk appetite as a board. At the moment, we are holding quite a lot of financial risk because of operational pressures, so managing risk in a structured way is important.

In addition, at the February board we discussed the sale of our Leeds based office, the findings from a recent audit of rent setting, our plans to develop new homes, and some of the challenges of bidding for limited government grant funding.

We also talked about some issues we are having with inconsistent service delivery by our main heating contractor and how this is being managed through contract negotiations – we are keen to see this resolved quickly and sorry for those of you who have had to raise complaints in response to this issue.

As a board we have some new members settling in and a number of us have been spending time with our customer facing teams to understand their processes better. This has included the team who take calls from customers, the Community Housing Officers, the Damp, Mould and Condensation team, the Complaints team and the Rent Arrears team. We are very proud of our energetic and motivated staff.

A report back from one of our committees means we have assurance on plans for board succession and heard about detailed discussions around staff reward. We also heard back from our Service Improvement Forum, made up of involved tenants, who provided a report back from their meeting to the board.