Corporate Plan 2023-26
Our Story:
In 2024 we celebrated 20 years of Golding Homes, following a stock transfer of homes from Maidstone Borough Council. Since then, we've invested heavily in regenerating our homes and neighbourhoods and committed £65m to improve our existing homes over three years from 2024 to 2027.
Today we own and manage just under 8,500 properties and provide a home for more than 20,000 people. We're committed to putting our customers at the heart of everything we do and to delivering excellent customer service. We believe strongly in the benefits of being a local community-based landlord, with strong partnerships that help us to provide sustainable homes and communities.
Vision:
Golding is efficient, local, visible and listening
Our Values:
• We care
• We welcome new ideas
• We take pride
Our operating context
The operating context for delivery of the Corporate Plan 2023-6 has been one of the most challenging ever facing the social housing sector and our customers continue to experience the effects of the cost-of-living crisis.
We’ve weathered the storm that’s hit the whole sector - increased costs driven by high inflation and cost of borrowing and more demand for spend on building safety and damp and mould. At the same time, we’ve seen a cap on income.
As we move into year 3 of the plan there’s still global uncertainty, with inflation and cost of borrowing remaining higher than anticipated.
The new government is consulting on a longer-term rent settlement, and the sector is lobbying for rent convergence. There are high expectations that the sector will continue to improve stock condition whilst contributing to the delivery of the target 1.5 million new homes over the life of this Parliament. This poses significant challenges for the sector. This plan plots Golding’s response.
The operating context challenges have impacted on our pace of delivery. In response we’ve focused on our core priorities and seen improvement, though in some instances not to the levels we set out to achieve at the outset of the Plan in 2023. We’ve an in depth understanding of our strengths and areas for improvement and plans in place to respond.
Our journey
We’ve made good progress over the first two years of our Plan, delivering significant improvements in our core repairs and customer services and laying the groundwork to change our neighbourhood model in April 2025. Our transactional and Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) all show improvements and we’re proud to have increased our TSM perception score for customer satisfaction by 10% in the last year.
Customer engagement is flourishing with over 3,000 customers actively involved in giving us feedback and influencing strategy, practice and the priorities in this Plan. While our Customer Compass exercise has updated our information on ‘knowing our customers’ so we can support fair access to our services.
We’ve committed to investing £65m over three years to improve our homes, with just under £20m spent in 2024/25, positively impacting 2,000 of our homes. We’ve reduced complaints, damp and mould cases and old repairs and maintained landlord compliance using strong data gathered from surveys of our homes.
Our continued commitment to providing affordable homes in Maidstone and the surrounding area has seen us deliver 554 new homes for 2,072 people over the last three years, as well as kicking off phase one of our multi-million-pound regeneration scheme (Fielding Park,) in Shepway.
Delivering our Corporate Plan
Our existing strategic focus remains strong for the third year of our plan.
We will:
· Do the basics brilliantly – focus on repairs and customer service to drive customer satisfaction and trust
· Listen to and act on our customers’ voices
· Be a visible, local and listening landlord, embedded in our communities, forging strong local partnerships
· Consolidate our operation around Maidstone to deliver operational efficiency
· Modernise our operations to get maximum benefit from technology and upskilling colleagues
· Use data to target and tailor our service delivery to ensure fair access and outcomes
· Redress historic under investment in our homes to improve quality of customers’ lives and keep them safe
· Continue to develop new homes to play our part in combatting the housing crisis
· Agree trade off investing in existing stock versus short term impact on financial metrics
· Plan for improving future financial resilience and cashable efficiencies
Our focus remains on our three interlinked strategic objectives:
- Excellent customer service
- Safe homes, sustainable communities
- Efficient, high performing organisation
You can read a summary of our ambitions for each objective in the sections below or see our full corporate plan which includes more information on what we’ve delivered in the first two years and how we’ll track and measure our objectives this year.
Excellent customer service
What we set out to achieve over the life of the plan:
By 2026 we’re aiming to make significant improvement in all of our core operational services. Our operating model will ensure we’re using insight to target and tailor services to customer needs. Our philosophy is ‘right channel, right customer’, responding to customers’ needs. High volume transactional services will be provided through a quality digital offer to make it easy for customers to do business with us, ensuring digital delivery becomes a channel of choice. This enables complex services and more vulnerable customers to benefit from face-to-face service delivery. Efficiencies released by more effective service delivery will be used to boost our operating margin and invest in more specialist services.
This year we’ll continue to drive improvements and embed the changes in frontline services including time taken to re-let empty homes. Our comparative performance is improving, and we need to continue that to deliver great services consistently . These service improvements should continue to drive up our perception scores and build trust . We’re also developing an expanded digital service offer for launch in 2025/26
Our priorities:
• Rollout our new Neighbourhood Model to strengthen local offers and improve outcomes for customers through our new ASB and Customer Support teams.
• Become more proactive and efficient in our repairs and maintenance service, introducing property MOTs and appointment tracking and improving our void turnaround time.
• Further expand customer engagement with opportunities in procurement and service improvement plans. Deliver activities like the Big Door Knock in April 2025, visiting 2000 homes in one day.
• Improve our communication with customers, increasing the digital tools available to help customers easily access information, request services and share feedback.
• Embed our Fair Access policy and initiatives, using customer feedback and service data to tailor services to customer needs.
• Further embed our learning from complaints across all teams
We’re setting the following targets to track and measure our success:
• 84% overall customer satisfaction*
• 86% satisfaction with customer service*
• 90% repairs completed on time
• 85% satisfaction with repairs*
• 61% satisfaction with handling of ASB
• 65% satisfaction with contribution to neighbourhood
• 64% customers trust us to do what we say we’ll do
• 0.8% voids loss
(*transactional)
Safe homes, sustainable communities
What we set out to achieve over the life of the plan:
By 2026 we’ll have invested an additional £44.5m in our homes. This will mean all our homes meet current decent homes standards, 84% will be at EPC C. We’ll also have delivered 570 new homes in the 3-year plan period
Our focus this year will be to sustain the pace of investing in our existing homes and deliver on remaining fire safety remediation programmes. We’ll be responding to new building safety requirements and Awaab’s law and taking a more proactive approach to dealing with cases of damp and mould. We’re aiming to improve feelings of safety in our homes and satisfaction with communal areas and our contribution to neighbourhoods.
Our priorities:
• Improve 2000 of our existing homes through £23m of investment.
• Ensure all homes meet Awaab’s Law safety standards, prioritising customers’ health and wellbeing.
• Maintain 100% landlord and building safety compliance.
• Progress fire remediation projects.
• Improve sustainability of homes and begin the Warm Homes programme.
• Deliver effective customer engagement through new Building Safety and Quality customer panel.
• Develop 142 safe, sustainable homes within target locations.
• Progress Fielding Park (Shepway Regen) Phase 1 and start Phase 2.
• Agree a new estates standard to improve communal spaces and launch new grounds maintenance contract.
• Update our Health & Safety management system in preparation for external assessment and accreditation in 2026/27.
We’re setting the following targets to track and measure our success:
• 90% satisfaction with planned works
• 100% compliance including Awaab’s law
• 100% of home with up-to-date stock condition survey
• 85% homes at or above Energy Performance Certificate level C
• 142 new homes completed
Efficient, high performing organisation
What we set out to achieve over the life of the plan:
By 2026 we want an operating model that delivers organisational efficiency and effectiveness to underpin service excellence. Our systems transformation will have delivered the underlying connectedness and simplicity that makes it easy to do business and our ‘one team’ culture will ensure our people can give their best for our customers. We’ll have achieved an operating margin of 25%.
This year we will develop deeper understanding of our costs and drive efficiencies and VFM (value for money) to improve core financial metrics. We’ll review our operating model to ensure its fit for purpose and focus on embedding our culture of high performance, accountability and collaboration.
We will not meet our original operating margin target of 25% by 2026. The impact of high inflation on our cost base and capping of social rents had a detrimental effect. Despite this, we’ve maintained a high level of investment into existing homes and accepted lower margins as a result. Our ambition for 2025/26 is for the margin to improve to over 15%.
Our systems roadmap is focused on core systems upgrade and replacement – the next phase, starting in 2025/26, will be to generate efficiencies and extend our digital offer for customers. Alongside this we’ll develop our data maturity and use data to drive improvements.
Our priorities:
• Launch our culture development programme, focusing on accountability, enhancing collaboration and reinforcing our values.
• Deliver new Data Strategy, enhancing data governance framework and improving data quality and availability.
• Commence design of a new Asset Management system ready for implementation in 2026/27.
• Define and agree roadmap for our housing management system including options appraisal for new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
• Embed new Risk and Assurance framework.
• Ensure operating model is fit for purpose, identifying inefficiencies and repetitive tasks to free up time for high-value activities.
• Establish a clear “cost-to-serve” model improving understanding of the impact on core service delivery.
• Review our commercial portfolio
We’re setting the following targets to track and measure our success:
• Operating margin 15.3% (minimum)
• Interest cover covenant 170% (minimum)
• Social Housing cost per unit £7,137 (maximum)
• Colleague engagement - 5.5/7 average rating
• Data quality measure to be confirmed by 30 June 2025