How we use your rent and maintain your home

Your rent goes towards a variety of things including repairs and maintenance on your home, administration costs and paying interest on our loans. This year, we received £125.3 million in rent from the general, affordable, intermediate, temporary, leasehold and shared ownership homes we manage. We spent £68.2 million of the money from rent on housing management and administration (£28.4 million) and repairs and maintenance (£39.8 million).

The pie chart below shows what your rent is used for.

What we use your rent money on

Maintaining homes

We’re committed to maintaining your home, keeping it in a good state of repair and ensuring your home is safe for you to live in. We use some of your rent to do this which goes towards our maintenance programmes and repairs service. Our maintenance and repairs services cover the replacements or renewal of different parts of your home when they reach the end of their serviceable life as well as health and safety compliance inspections.

82.6%

resident satisfaction with overall repairs (target 85%)

88.7%

repairs we completed within target time (target 95%)

100%

of homes had a valid gas safety certificate (target 100%)

Every year, as part of our compliance programme, we inspect all the homes we rent out to check and service the heating appliances, smoke detectors and fire sprinklers.

We also inspect the building you live in. Our compliance programme includes:

  • gas safety
  • water hygiene safety
  • lift safety inspections
  • electrical safety
  • fire risk assessment
  • fire safety maintenance (alarm testing, sprinkler servicing, emergency lighting, etc.)
  • fall arrest system checks (safety access equipment checks)
  • asbestos surveys.

We’ve maintained good levels of compliance throughout the year despite the challenges we faced with the Government’s Covid-19 restrictions. Although we had to temporarily stop some of our programmes during the year, by October 2020 we were able to recover the 100% gas safety service position, which we’ve maintained to date, and by the end of March 2021 all other compliance programmes were back to normal.

Looking forward...

We will continue to make improvements to our maintenance and compliance programmes by revising some of our processes to be as efficient and sustainable as possible. We are also assessing the value for money performance of our contracts and have already started some initiatives with more to start later in the year. We’ve reviewed and implemented changes to emergency lighting and our fire safety maintenance processes, and we will do the same for our electrical, access and security contracts followed by a review of our gas and water contracts later in the year.

We are keen to involve residents in our continuous performance improvement plans during 2021/22 and will invite resident panel members to our meetings with maintenance contractors. They will have the opportunity to observe the meeting and work with the contract management teams to design and monitor service improvements over the life of the contract.