Across the Board – March 2026

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

As we start to see spring take hold and welcome warmer weather in March, the board of Connect met, in large part to agree the budget for the coming financial year.

Diane French, Chair

This year we are faced with a difficult external environment with a war in the Middle East creating an unknown or unpredictable set of impacts – How long will it go on? What impact will it have on inflation? How will this feed into cost of borrowing?

But it is important for us to try to set a budget we have confidence in so that we can hold ourselves to account for financial disciplines and agree what we can afford to do in the coming year. We know this impacts our tenants because it affects how much money we can spend on new kitchens and bathrooms, new homes, schemes to help reduce the impact of energy bills. In our next board meeting in May we will discuss how we ‘stress test’ the budget or business plan, which means how we think about all the things that might happen, model the impact of that happening and then think hard about what we would do if we were in that situation. We know this is a year when we might need to be nimble in responding to our external environment.

We were delighted as a board to hear how many of you responded to our recent survey on how we prioritise investing our resources and are hoping a number of you will also join us in April to discuss this more. We did approve the budget for 2026/27, aware that it will be a tight year financially. We know we will have that in common with all of you, so it does mean that how we prioritise what we do, and how, is even more important.

We also spent time at the board hearing back from the Customer Voice Group, approving the paperwork for a development grant, reviewing our customers and communities plan and thinking about our performance and targets for the coming year. We try to hear a customer or staff story whenever we meet and this time heard an anonymised story about the impact anti-social behaviour was having on some of our tenants. These stories are always difficult and we know our staff work hard in the background, but cannot always share all of the legal processes we have to go through to take action – so it may seem like we are not moving things forward when we are in fact doing all we can.

I know that a huge part of what makes Connect work is our staff – their capacity, and competence, their customer focus, and humanity – so as a board we also took an interest in the recruitment process for a new Director of Finance and the recruitment of an interim Property Services Manager for 12 months to help existing managers have time to work on improvements to our repairs process overall.

Finally, and I hope you may have heard this elsewhere, we were delighted to be able to celebrate the results of Connect’s recent regulatory inspection. We were judged on our governance (how we are run), our viability (our financial sustainability) and our customer focus. We achieved the highest rating possible for governance and customer focus and a compliant rating for viability – which dropped slightly from last time we were inspected to reflect the difficult financial times and our intention to keep investing in our existing and new homes.

As ever I am so grateful to all of you that provide feedback to us in any way – it is all very important in helping us be the best we can be.