Across the Board – February 2026

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

February is a month when we start to hope for spring after a very wet and dreary January. It is also when we come together to set up our plans for the financial year which starts in April.

Diane French, Chair

So, the February board had a big agenda. Probably most importantly, we started to talk about the budget for 2026/27 and how we make the very best use of stretched finances. Do we invest in a faster repairs service, new homes, warmer homes, greener homes? We will have to balance these things out.

We are grateful as always for our involved tenants who help us think about these things and if you’d like to join them, even in a small way, please get in touch.

We heard a customer story about a complaint where we hadn’t got things right and discussed how process changes have been made to ensure we learn from it.

We also had a battery of performance reports on finance, health & safety, customer experience, and talked about the areas where we need to do better as well as the areas where we are doing well.

The report from the Leadership team filled us in on the huge amount of work that’s always ongoing on all sorts of projects, for example; customer surveys, preparing for the renter’s rights act, a new apprentice joining the Sustainability team, an action plan for the staff survey and our customer charter.

We signed off a loan agreement to enable us to invest in new homes and were excited to see new opportunities for land deals coming up in what we call the development pipeline. We discussed a pilot scheme with Octopus energy and wider housing and Local Authority partners to trial photovoltaic panels on shared roofs.

We will be back in March to discuss the budget again.