Governance

With increasingly stringent regulation imposed on the sector, good governance, in all its forms, has never been so important

This year, we are proud that Karbon has retained the highest regulatory rating available of G1/V1 from the Regulator of Social Housing.

It was also a year where we received the coveted Better Health at Work Awards Gold level accreditation, a programme which recognises the achievements of employers in the North East in promoting the health and well-being of their employees.

More recently, in May 2023, Standard & Poor’s awarded Karbon with an uplift to our single A (stable) credit rating, moving our outlook to ‘positive’, recognising that Karbon continues to offer a quality social housing provision, has an experienced management team and is showing comparatively stronger performance than many of our peers in these challenging economic times.

We use Housemark benchmarking to assess the health of our operations and a few areas of real progress stand out, including the health of our operating margin since our inception in 2017, moving from below average to a sector leading position:

One of our key enablers is Value for Money, with cost per unit of social housing used a performance indicator. Keeping this figure healthy means finding ways to provide a better service in the face of a tough economic environment. One of the ways in which we have done this is by embracing new technology.

For example, we introduced ‘On our way’ text messages in to give customers more visibility around their appointments, and this has improved our access rates to customer homes to 97.66% and saved around £14,000 per month. Similarly, we have recently adopted Mobysoft’s ‘Repair Sense’, a technology which shows us where repeat repairs have occurred across our homes. This has helped identify the root causes for these repeat repairs saving us money in the longer term. So far, Repair Sense has reduced repeat visits by 36% which we forecast will reduce the number of repairs by 5,000 per annum.

We have increased customer voice within our core governance structure by establishing the Group Customer Committee, which is a combination of Karbon board and five customer-representatives. This development is an example of how we continue to integrate the voice of residents at levels where they need to be heard, promoting a culture of listening and importantly, acting on that insight.

Our approach to customer voice within our governance structures and our continued compliance with the Regulator’s consumer and economic standards, underpinned by our proactive approach to the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures, will ensure that Karbon is in a good place to meet the requirements of forthcoming changes in consumer regulation. Our actions show we are ready and supportive.