The last financial year, 2020/21 was one of significant change for Abri Group in our first year of trading as a new organisation and set against the backdrop of the global pandemic. Our underlying surplus before tax was £21.8m with a net margin of 10%.
We continued to invest in our integration agenda and streamlined the Abri corporate structure as planned. As part of the group restructuring we took the decision to incur exceptional refinancing costs of £27m in order to generate lower future interest costs, and in turn enhance our financial capacity and resilience. These one-off refinancing costs, along with a £5m provision for cladding remediation works, contributed to a small net deficit position for the year of £5.6m.
However, even with challenging operating conditions we were delighted that our rental income collection remained particularly strong, with arrears remaining at 1.76%, underlining the strength in our core operating business.
Our shared ownership sales activity remained resilient throughout the year, delivering a surplus of £3.3m and a strong order book going into the following financial year. Our share of profits from our joint venture activity contributed a healthy £2.6m of income to the bottom line.
As per our commitment, every pound that we generate is reinvested back into our homes and communities. We are committed to ensuring our homes are of the highest quality and as safe as possible for our customers and during the year we invested £147m in building new homes and £55.3m in enhancing the quality and safety of our existing homes, including £9.7m on fire safety and cladding remediation. Additionally, we invested £2.5m in our communities, and raised £0.7m of additional external funding for our community and employment programmes.
The integration and corporate restructuring activity during 2020/21 will allow Abri to deliver our final phase of integration during 2021/22 and further improve Abri’s long term financial performance and resilience.