Across the Board – September 2025 update

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

September sometimes feels like a ‘back to school’ month, even if you don’t have children to pack off to school – the weather changes, we start to dig out winter clothes and the same is true at Connect.

Diane French, Chair

Even though we work through the summer and our gardening teams are at their happiest – there is still a sense of a new term starting in September.

Our September board is also the time when we look back to our achievements in 2024-25, because we hold our Annual General Meeting and approve our accounts for logging with Companies House. In order to do that we have to approve our compliance with the standards by which we are regulated. We have to comply with standards around:

• Governance – how we organise and check on the management of Connect.
• Viability – whether we have a financial plan which tracks forward for 30 years and shows we stay solvent when we put in all the plans we have to spend money on new and existing housing.
• Rent – that our rent setting meets all the strict rules set by government.
• Consumer – how we work with and treat you as our customers and tenants.

We were pleased to highlight lots of good work by our teams and just a few were: a year when we saw new housing finished, something which has been difficult in the post-covid period; the launch of our new online portal for you our consumers to use – giving you a new option for logging things with us, checking your rent account etc; and we have also seen real engagement with our involved tenants who have contributed to ‘deep dives’ into various issues, have helped us review our policies on things that impact you and have designed with us a new Customer Charter. Please do get in touch with us if you want to hear more about ways to get involved.

Finances

We also spent time at the board reviewing how our current financial year (2025/26) is working out, noting that we have run broadly to budget. We have seen some improvements in the measures we watch around our repairs performance – which we know is really important to you as customers of Connect – and our safety measures. We received a report on how we are learning from complaints, as well as hearing feedback from our Customer Voice Group and Customer Experience Working Group.

Surveys

Clearly, we are often only as good as our staff team, so we heard about the results of a recent staff survey and were pleased to get a 92% response rate. We would love to get as many of our customers responding to our surveys sent to you – feedback really does help us improve. It might not always be instant and I’m sure we don’t always get it right – but we really do want to hear from as many voices as possible to make Connect as good as possible. We talked about how we keep our staff, tenants and communities safe and how we help everyone to have positive, respectful and inclusive discussions about issues which sometimes produce quite big differences of opinion.

Electricity costs

As a board we also had a big discussion about investing in a pilot scheme to work out how to enable some of our tenants to benefit form lower tariff electricity via photovoltaic technology (solar panels)- we hope this will be a step further along the path to making sure our housing is sustainable, easy and affordable to keep warm and benefits our customers well into the future.

Vital statistics, goodbyes and hellos

As I finish, I want to recommend that everyone has a look at our Vital Statistics document – it is such a great snapshot of our numbers – how we spend money, how many homes we have etc. I also want to say thank you to Alicia, who retired as a Non-Executive Director at the Annual General Meeting after six years. She has been so diligent in her commitment to Connect. We welcomed a new board member called Shaheda in her place. Shaheda has been an associate Non-Executive Director for the last year. This is a good time to remind you that we have a training programme ready for any customers that might aspire to become members of the Connect board.

As ever it is a genuine privilege to be the Chair of Connect.