We're pleased to publish our combined financial statements and annual report for 2021-22, which document our organisation's performance and a number of our team's achievements from the last financial year.
Our colleagues has worked hard to meet or exceed the targets set for the first year of our Better Futures strategy. We remain financially resilient, maintaining healthy levels of surplus (£14.9m) against sector upper-quartile levels of investment in our new and existing homes.
Our turnover has also stayed consistent (£29m in 2021-22), and we expect to exceed £44m in 2022-23.
This year we secured £65m of additional long-term financing from bLEND and ARA Venn. The latter, which is the funding vehicle for the new Affordable Homes Guarantee Scheme was achieved at just 38 basis points over the gilt and an all-in cost of borrowing rate of 1.527%. B3Living, along with two other housing associations, were the first in the country to take advantage of this exceptionally low rate.
While these accounts are here to demonstrate our financial and operational resilience, we hope that they also show how we are keeping true to our purpose and values, staying close to our local community, all while stepping up our efforts to be more inclusive, sustainable and customer focused.
Our current Financial Statement is available via the link below, and copies of our previous reports and publications can be found here.
The Better Futures strategy includes some very ambitious targets, including delivering 500 new affordable homes over the three years, a 10% increase in our stock, but with our enthusiasm, innovation and aptitude we are making good progress towards meeting this and our other corporate objectives.
Highlights from our report include:
- Delivering excellent customer experiences: Our Great Starts pilot project brought customer satisfaction with re-let homes up to 90% while we've maintained our overall customer satisfaction score (86%), despite unprecedented pressures on our services.
- Building locally: We have invested around £40m in the provision of new affordable homes, with 119 new homes successfully completed in the year including our 5,000th home. Our ambition to deliver 500 new homes by 2024 remains.
- Offering safe, good quality homes and estates: We have also invested a further £5m in improving our existing homes and in a significant customer and building safety programme.
- Being a responsible business: Our regulator reconfirmed B3Living's G1 / V1 ratings, the highest possible scores for viability and governance, following an in-depth assessment in March 2022 and we have achieved full compliance with NHF Code of Governance 2020.
- Cutting carbon: Our innovative Greener Herts collaboration launched this year, uniting our sustainability efforts with two neighbouring providers.
- Giving support when life changes: We're proud of the sector-leading performance of 102% collection achieved by our Rents team, who champion a "Collect with Care" ethos. Alongside this, our Community Development and frontline teams have built a strong local support network for our customers which helped us to, for example, secure £30k in Household Support Grant and recover £42k in unclaimed benefits for B3Living customers (via our partnerships with agencies like the DWP and Citizens Advice).
- Creating a great, inclusive place to work: We committed to paying the Real Living Wage, and ensuring it is paid along our supply chain, and are pleased to report that representation of different ethnic groups has improved at Board level.
We also publish a full an Annual Review for our customers, to show how we have delivered against our service standards.
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