This year we spent over  £10m  maintaining, upgrading and improving our housing stock across North London and Hertfordshire,   as part of our long term commitment to provide our residents with safe, decent homes.  We have continued to focus on fire safety measures across our housing stock and have spent £3.8m to ensure the safety of our residents remains our priority.

We keep residents updated throughout the process of assessing or upgrading  any fire safety measures at our developments or blocks to ensure we can act on any feedback. We also keep our Fire Safety information on our website updated to ensure any resident can quickly access the fire risk assessment for their building on our portal for residents using just their postcode.

It’s been a busy year for our Fire Safety Team following the introduction of new government legislation to ensure all high rise buildings are as safe as possible. The team completed 446 in-depth fire risk assessments and over 2300 Fire Risk Actions to make sure our residents and the homes they live in are as safe as possible. Fire Risk Actions cover all sorts of fire safety work including; checking and installing fire doors, carrying out electrical and gas safety tests, servicing and testing fire alarms and making sure we’ve got personal emergency evacuation plans for all of our residents that need them.

We've also been gathering much more information on the  energy efficiency of our homes 

We increased the number of homes surveyed by over 500% from 700, to over 4000 homes. This information will help us plan the best ways of becoming greener across the organisation, reduce our carbon emissions and ensure we are offering the most energy efficient, cost effective options to our residents.

This year we've  continued our work to ensure our homes remain decent and safe, investing:

 

£435k in kitchen replacements
£307k in bathroom replacements
£514k in energy efficient window replacements
£1.2m carrying out external repairs, decoration and improvements
£608k in new energy efficient boiler installations
£847k on over 600 fire doors.

 

Our committment to building more affordable homes

 During 2019/20, we invested £56.5m in developing 247 new homes, investing over £20m more than 2018/19 to ensure we're doing everything we can to build much needed affordable homes. We’re proud that 66% of the 247 homes we delivered in 2019/20 are affordable. In total, we now own and manage 6,959 homes and we're on track to build 337 new homes in 2020/21 and over 750 more by 2022 as part of our ambitious four year plan.

 

This year we built more homes for private sale to generate the money needed to ensure we can continue to reinvest in our existing homes and the neighbourhoods they are in while building more, much needed affordable homes throughout North London and Hertfordshire.

Case study: Our latest project as part of the Connected Partnership
 

As a member of 'The Connected Partnership', with Octavia and Shepherds Bush Housing Group we became a 'strategic partner' to benefit from £27m of grant funding to build 525  homes over the next three years. We have just signed up several major construction companies to work on our next four-year project. This project involves investing a collective £300million to refurbish current homes and develop new affordable homes as one of the new strategic partners announced by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan who commit to delivering at least 60% of affordable housing in all developments.

Building homes isn't all about the numbers, meet Sadia one of our residents who talked to us about what her new home meant for her