Across the Board – November update

Twice a year the board spend a whole day together discussing issues that face Connect in more detail than there’s usually time for.

In November we did this the day after a board meeting so, as we have a number of new board members, we included an overnight stay as, although when funds are tight this may seem like a difficult thing for us to justify, it is very important for board members to know each other well enough to have difficult discussions. It takes time spent together to get to know each other.

Budgeting

Diane French, Chair

Our November seminar always looks forward to setting the budget for the next financial year.

This year budgeting was very topical, with such close proximity to the government’s budget statement in October. It is fair to say that there are lots of financial uncertainties and budgets are stretched. We are all familiar with this when we budget for ourselves.

As Connect, we have to plan not just for 2025/26 but for the next 30 years as we are required to show that, if we follow our plans, we will remain viable which is important to the organisations who lend us money to build more homes and invest in making more of our homes as energy efficient as possible, as well as the the Regulator who oversees our work .

In practice what this means is we have to think carefully about our plans. For example; how many new bathrooms and kitchens can we complete in 2025/26 alongside delivering the day-to-day repair service, work to save energy in homes, deliver other essential work and acquire new homes to help more people have high quality housing. Then we have to think about what happens to these plans, and the money we need to fulfil them, if different possibilities happen such as interest rates or inflation increasing which impact the cost of supplying services and repaying debt.

The government’s budget means we know that our wage bill will go up with national insurance payments, amongst other things, but somethings are less certain such as how the global markets, which affect our country’s fortunes, react. This process is called business planning and stress testing. The Regulator requires us to think about what we would do if a ‘stress’ occurs to impact our finances and what we would do about it, i.e, what we could do to reduce our spending, if something we were not expecting happens – which when budgets are tight anyway is always difficult to do.

Customer Experience Working Group

Alongside these discussions we also spent time as a board talking about our customer experience working group and in particular the work they are doing on learning from complaints; our development strategy, outlining how we build new homes which is a process with many potential risks; and a particularly challenging development of new homes which is stretching our willingness to take risk.

It was timely, therefore, that we also talked about risk management, our financial performance and signed off our Treasury Management Policy which guides how we manage the way we raise money via debt. With the help of feedback from involved-tenants via the Service Improvement Forum we agreed the rent and service charge policy and the rent increase. This is always a difficult decision as we have to balance the impact on our tenants, who we know are often struggling, with the need to be viable after a long period when inflationary cost increases have exceeded the rate of increase in our income, which primarily comes from capped rents.

Health and safety

At every board meeting we also review health and safety performance – and this time we reviewed learning from the recently published Grenfell report – which was a difficult read knowing that, with different decisions made by many people, lives could have been saved.

Many of the lessons have already been built into new regulatory standards but there are also lessons we can take to inform our approach to customer care. Again it was timely that, over the two days, we also discussed our plans for the future in terms of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, to ensure that we keep improving our offer to all members of the community to achieve equitable outcomes.

To check how we are doing in this respect, we also review our customer insight report each time we meet – which pulls together an analysis of all the areas of feedback and data we have on our interactions with our tenants to make sure we are seeing the full picture. This information helps us continue to improve our customer care and inform our future plans.

I hope this gives you an overview of the many and complex discussions we have to ensure Connect stays as a strong, connected organisation committed to best serving the interests of our present and future tenants.

As always we would always be delighted to hear your feedback and are eager to hear from anyone willing to become more involved with decision making as a tenant.