2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of Golding Homes, following the stock transfer of homes from Maidstone Borough Council. Since then, we've invested more than £283m in regenerating our homes and neighbourhoods.
Today we own and manage over 8,500 properties and provide a home for more than 29,000 people. We're committed to delivering outstanding customer service and believe strongly in the benefits of being a local community-based housing association.
Our partnership with Maidstone Borough Council remains critical to us, as together we support local residents to achieve the best outcomes and quality of life.
Golding is efficient, local, visible and listening, providing sustainable homes and communities.
As one of the largest landlords in Kent, we're committed to providing high-quality affordable homes to meet the local housing need as well as investing in our communities. We're taking a focused geographical approach to building new homes in order to maximise our local impact and are keen to develop in Maidstone and immediate surrounds.
Our operating environment has become much more demanding. The
complexity of recovering from the pandemic, war in Ukraine, 40-year high inflation, rent cap and ongoing
supply issues has significantly impacted all housing associations. Social inequality has widened and the
housing crisis has deepened with the need for good quality affordable homes
increasing,
particularly in
the south-east.
Our customers are facing more challenging circumstances
through the cost-of-living crisis and their needs
are becoming more complex.
The reputation of the housing sector has been damaged with high profile coverage of unacceptably poor housing conditions where tenants were not listened to, and their concerns ignored. Quite rightly, as a result, the sector faces increased regulation of consumer standards with more emphasis on how we involve customers and really listen to their views. Tenant satisfaction measures, a combination of hard management information and tenant perception scores were introduced in April 2023 and senior staff will be required to hold professional qualifications, to ensure high standards of service.
Last year Golding regained its G1V1 rating by the Regulator of Social Housing, reflecting a significant period of change to improve landlord compliance and other areas of the business which has been sustained. This journey has meant Golding has a comprehensive data set on its stock to plan improvements. We're using this data to plan investment in our stock, restarting our programme of cyclical repairs and improving the sustainability of our homes in line with the challenge of zero carbon.
We've worked with customers, colleagues and partners to develop this new three-year plan, which ensures a laser like focus on improving our core services.
In 2023/24 our focus will be on delivering the basics brilliantly. We're aiming for quality, simplicity, and efficiency and to ensure delivery of median performance for all our core customer-facing services.
We believe our colleagues are key to providing excellent service and we'll continue to invest in their development and the tools needed to do their jobs. The labour market remains challenging, so it's essential that we're a great local employer and can attract and retain talented colleagues.
In the coming year, we'll look at how we operate and how we're organised, to increase productivity. These foundations will ensure we're ready for enhanced consumer regulation.
From 2024 onwards we'll build on those foundations, continue to invest in our systems to drive efficiency, improve our operating margins and deliver further improvements in customer satisfaction. We'll also consolidate our Maidstone focus to provide the most effective service delivery model and further improve our core customer facing services and operating margin.
This new Plan focuses on three key Corporate Objectives which aim to deliver improved customer satisfaction and quality of homes, efficiencies and value for money.
By 2026 all our core operational services will be high performing. Our operating model will ensure we're using insight to target and personalise services to customer needs. High volume transactional services will be provided through a high-quality digital offer that is used by the majority of our customers. Efficiencies released by more effective service delivery will be used to boost our operating margin and to invest in more specialist services.
In 2023/24 we'll:
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 2023/24 we'll:
By 2026 we want an operating model that delivers organisational efficiency and effectiveness to underpin service excellence. Our systems transformation will simplify the way we work and make it easy to do business. Our 'one team' culture will ensure our people can give their best for our customers. We'll have achieved an operating margin of 25%.
In 2023/24 we'll:
