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Great Places Housing Group to deliver fewer homes with more strategic partner cash
Manchester-based Great Places Housing Group has revised its delivery target with Homes England due to “challenging markets” and increased cost pressures.
The 25,000-home association revealed it had renegotiated its development target as a strategic partner of Homes England for the financial year to the end of March 2023.
The landlord originally secured £240.8m in grant funding to deliver 4,920 homes by 2028. It has now revised that delivery target down to 4,500 at an increased grant level of £270m.
Great Places put the new terms down to increased costs pressures and the “challenging markets that we continue to work within”.
The association completed 649 homes in the 2022-23 financial year, up from 557 in the previous year.
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In addition to the completions, there were 852 affordable homes started across 17 sites.
The landlord’s group turnover was up 1% in 202-23 to £168m. At the same time, its turnover from social housing lettings was up more than £6m to £121.3m.
Income from shared ownership first tranche sales and open market sales income was £34.3m, more than £4m down on the previous year. However, Great Places said this was still in line with its planned development programme.
Its operating surplus was 1.8% lower at £45.9m and its margin declined slightly to 23.6%. This reduction was due to the inflationary increases around maintenance costs and building safety costs.
There were 58,000 repairs requests across the association’s stock in 2022-23, which it said “can be partially attributed to increased media focus on property condition in the sector, together with our proactive campaigns to report issues”.
Great Places said: “Operational performance remained strong despite the challenging economic and operating environments and external pressures including rising material and labour costs, significantly increasing energy costs and high inflation levels.
“In addition, there was a cap on rents imposed by the government, effective from April 2023, that was well below the levels of inflation, which adds to the many challenges that we face.
“We had expected that general inflationary pressures would significantly impact tenant arrears, however this was mitigated by support provided to our tenants through energy bill support and our hardship and community resilience funds. We recognise that the cost of living crisis will continue to put increased pressure on arrears performance.”
The landlord’s financial statements also contain several references to its intended merger with Mosscare St Vincent’s, which was to take place during the 2023-24 financial year.
However, the accounts were signed off before it was revealed earlier this month that the two associations had ended their talk of a tie-up.
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