Plus Dane’s top team talks regeneration, retrofit and homelessness

Key to Mr Reed’s tenure so far has been sorting out “some internal things” to “de-risk the organisation as much as we possibly could”.

“We refinanced the organisation,” he says. “We focused on our internal controls framework. We had proper conversations with colleagues around the local government pension scheme.”

In 2022-23, Plus Dane posted a £4.4m deficit, primarily due to the cost of unwinding two local government defined benefits pension schemes.

“We had no control over the employer contribution rate,” Mr Reed explains. “It was going to go from something in the region of 32% to 42%, which we couldn’t have withstood within the organisation without making some severe cost reductions.”

The chiefs planned to withdraw from one scheme with a lump sum payment and spread the other over several years, but the Liz Truss-induced market shocks of late 2022 brought down the deficits on the scheme enough that they could pay both off in one go.

“We delivered certainty in that year and took the impairment as a result of that,” says Ms Dixon, who has spent 24 years in the housing sector and covers development, finance, performance and IT. This year’s results will look much healthier, she adds.

Plus Dane launched its latest corporate plan in April, which places an emphasis on investing in existing homes and regeneration. This year, the association will spend £20m investing in existing homes, Ms Dixon says.

“As soon as Homes England started using the word ‘regeneration’ again last year, you start driving some of that excitement,” Mr Reed says.

Plus Dane has started to use Savills’ Shape data framework to categorise homes into one of four possible regeneration types.

For any future regeneration projects, the housing association will use one scheme, Welsh Street, as its blueprint. The area contained just over 100 old terraced houses that once housed Welsh miners. An early plan to demolish and rebuild the homes was called in by then-housing secretary Eric Pickles on heritage grounds, leading to a rethink.

The final regeneration, completed in 2022 after 20 years of deliberation, preserves the original brick shells of the homes while knocking through internal walls to make the dwellings bigger for families and increasing garden space.

“Part of being a sustainable organisation is around testing and innovation,” says Mr Reed. 

In the past two years, Plus Dane took part in several pilots, but “the big one” was the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. For the first wave of the scheme, Plus Dane fitted out 40 homes with ground-source heat pumps.

“We learned a lot around specifications, customer engagement, mixed-tenure blocks,” Mr Reed says. “Some of this stuff is quite intrusive.”

For Wave 2, they had identified another mixed-tenure block for retrofit, but eventually decided to improve 400 individual homes in Toxteth. “That way, we’re not compromising the investment because it’s taking longer to get people on board, or they don’t want to come on board,” Ms Dixon says.

Mostly terraced houses from 1919, the landlord had identified the area as the source of lots of disrepair and damp and mould cases. Work began in December to fit them with internal wall insulation, photovoltaic panels and ventilation. Each retrofit takes three weeks per property, from survey through to delivery.

A bid for Wave 3 from the Liverpool Combined Authority consortium, which Plus Dane is a part of, is in production for October.

“What we found from customers is changing the language: ‘making your home warm’, rather than ‘we’re doing this for net zero targets,’” says Ms Dixon. “If the customer’s not alongside you, the investment is going to be wasted.”