I’m pleased to report that, overall, Abri performed well in its first year, in challenging circumstances. As well as dealing with the impacts of the pandemic, Brexit and general economic uncertainty, we made good progress in integrating our two legacy organisations to create cost and revenue synergies so that we can do more for our customers and communities in future.
Like all organisations, we adapted our services and paused some business activities to reduce the spread of the pandemic and to keep customers and colleagues safe. We want to be a top ten provider for customer service. This is an area we want to improve, as it’s been impacted negatively by the pandemic. At 81.1%, customer satisfaction is not where we want it to be. We’ve established a new Resident Scrutiny Panel to place our customers’ voices at the heart of our organisation, help us identify where we can improve and hold us to account to deliver those improvements.
We know that having motivated employees offers the best chance of delivering outstanding service to customers. The fact that Abri was recognised as one of the best companies to work for, with outstanding levels of colleague engagement, augurs well for our service improvement plans.
Despite the challenging environment, we completed 801 new homes during the year – well on the way to our commitment to build at least 1,000 new homes a year over the next ten years. We ended the year with a strong pipeline of 1,333 homes. We also hold the contract with Homes England as their Help to Buy agent for the south of England and helped 2,048 people secure their own home.
We continued to invest in our existing homes, delivering £19.9 million of improvements and committing a further £24.5 million for investment works next year. In addition, we’re investing £46.9 million in building and fire safety over the next five years as this remains a top priority.
During the year we announced our intention to invest £15 million over five years in some of the most deprived areas in the south of England, to tackle poverty, homelessness and to empower lives. We made progress here, allocating £85,000 to 89 community-based organisations and helping 303 people directly into work and 689 into training through our employment support and training programmes. We also made over 7,000 calls to help tackle social isolation and provided 2,163 meals to families in need.
The pandemic has undoubtedly been a tipping point for change and united our country with a shared vision of a world that is more equal, diverse and inclusive by nature. We’ve all got a part to play and as an organisation Abri plans to do more in this space.
We’ve established a new equality, diversity and inclusion committee and begun to raise awareness of issues among colleagues, customers and our communities. We’ve carried out research into violence towards women and girls to support an education programme that will make a difference in the communities we work. We’re also increasing representation across our customer committees and regularly carry out equality impact assessments to identify and address equality issues in our business.
We’re now focusing on collecting more information about our customers and communities to provide the necessary insights to deliver the best possible service we can. By talking to our customers and actively changing the way we do things, we hope to see positive outcomes for everyone.
Looking ahead, our environment is likely to be equally challenging. But we remain ambitious, confident that the actions we’ve taken to secure and optimise our long-term financial position will provide a strong platform from which to achieve our strategic goal of becoming a top ten housing developer and provider.
Much has been said about the carbon challenge. With more than £6 billion in assets, 80,000 customers and 1,550 employees, we can and will make a significant contribution to the country achieving net zero. This will involve: helping, guiding and informing colleagues and customers what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint; retrofitting our existing homes to make them more energy efficient and designing and building sustainable homes for the future, using the latest technologies and modern methods of construction.
To do this, we believe that partnership is key. We’ve created the Greener Futures Partnership with four other housing providers to improve the sustainability and energy efficiency of homes. We’ve also secured partnerships to deliver more than 900 homes using modern methods of construction over the next five years and adopted the Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing.
It won’t be easy. But we remain committed to building more safe, warm and sustainable homes and playing our part in creating thriving communities to improve people’s life chances.