Across the Board – March 2025 update

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

Our March board meeting exists in large part to sign off the budget for the financial year 25/26, and as we all know it is difficult in the current climate to get budgets to add up – they are always a balancing act – all the things we’d like to do versus what we can afford.

Diane French, Chair

We are grateful to our financial colleagues and our leadership team for all the work they do to present us with a viable budget. We hope that we have got the right blend of spending for now and investment for the future.

Consideration of the budget came in tandem with thinking about our Treasury strategy which defines how and when we will borrow money or raise capital. We also agreed a plan for what we hope to achieve next year with the money that we spend and what we will spend over the next 30 years.

Our current priorities have been discussed with our involved tenants in the Service Improvement Forum – which goes from strength to strength in working with us and mirroring topics that are coming to the board meetings. We are so grateful for all those that give their time to this.

At the board we also discussed recent internal audits which check we are applying our policies correctly, we discussed a number of strategies which we review regularly such as how we work in partnerships, how we work with customers and how we respond to the climate emergency in sustainability practices.

The final theme in the board was how we learn form all sorts of information – so we consider what our involved tenants are telling us, we consider what we learn from time spent with staff, we consider if there are lessons for us from the now published Grenfell inquiry and we asked our newer board members to feed back on their impressions of us after 200 days in office.

All-in-all, another busy meeting