15 minutes with… Sheron Carter

How is Hexagon approaching the cost of living crisis with its tenants? What support will it have in place?

It’s absolutely a top priority. And it’s complicated, because the cost of living is affecting all of us.

We’re seeing huge increases in development and maintenance costs, and the price of fuel.

It’s getting more challenging to run a business, because of cost inflation.

The question that’s going to be coming up for all of us in the sector in the next few months is, ‘What does that mean for the level of rent-setting and our ability to maintain good services for customers and decarbonisation?’

So there is a balance that we’re going to [have to strike] in the coming years.

We have a tenant welfare fund and we’ve increased that fivefold compared with the level that we had in our budget last year, to £100,000. We’ve done that in anticipation of more customers facing hardship with paying for food or [their] energy bills.

We have teams that work with tenants to maximise their income to make sure that they’re getting any additional Discretionary Housing Payments, or make referrals to food banks for people who are really pressed in terms of
food shortages.

Energy bills are skyrocketing at the moment. What is Hexagon’s approach?

One of the things we’ve started to do when we have a void and there are prepayment meters [in the property] is remove them, because we know that is the most costly form of paying for your energy supply.

We have encouraged people to try to negotiate better terms with their suppliers. And we also encourage them to get in touch with their suppliers, because some have their own financial hardship funds that people can access.

What are your decarbonisation plans?

We did a study last year, so we got to understand our properties a bit more. From that, we know that we have fewer than 1,000 homes that [currently have] an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) [that is better than] Band C.

One of our first priorities will be to bring those properties up to at least a minimum of Band C. We have set aside £4.2m to do this. That is in addition to our budget, to ensure that we do hit the EPC Band C minimum by 2030.

We’ve set aside over £45m to achieve net zero carbon by 2050. We are aware that Hexagon has a lot of older street properties. We’ve got some beautiful Edwardian and Victorian buildings that are highly desirable, but not necessarily the easiest to make completely carbon neutral.

We would have to take a practical approach to minimise carbon as far as is [possible] within those older properties.

We’re not in the business of disposing of things because they are in the ‘too difficult to do’ box.

Have you got any plans to merge with a larger organisation?

You can never completely take mergers off the table, but we have no active plans to merge.

I don’t know whether mergers provide the solutions they once did. What I’m seeing in the sector is that all providers, including the largest, which could take on another association, are facing these big costs. [They all] have very large commitments in terms of fire safety, building safety and decarbonisation.

So there isn’t an obvious reason at the moment why we would want to merge, but that may change.