Complaints Panel ClwydAlyn

ENNILLYDD y Wobr Cynnwys Tenantiaid wrth Lunio Gwasanaethau WINNER of the Involving Tenants in Shaping Services Award

Our Complaints panel won the Involving Tenants in Shaping Services at the TPAS Good Practice Awards 2021.

2021/22

How all the income we collected last year was spent

Management Costs £6.4 million

Service Costs £18.7 million Day to Day Maintenance £7 million

Management costs

Cover all ClwydAlyn’s overheads (costs), including things like finance, IT, communications, governance, housing staff and the business costs associated with running the organisation.

Service Costs

Cover the cost of providing services at our homes such as cleaning, window cleaning, gardening, utilities, and council tax. It also covers the maintenance and replacement of communal equipment such as door entry systems, gates, lifts, TV aerials, laundry equipment, as well as the refurbishment of communal areas. It also includes staff costs such as cleaners, catering staff, nurses, care practitioners and project workers who work in our homeless and supported living services.

Day to day repairs

Is the cost of our responsive repairs (fixing things when they break).

Major Improvements £6.5 million

Mortgage Repayments £7.2 million

Void and Bad Debts £1.9m

Major improvements

Is the cost of long-term improvements to our homes such as rewiring, electrical heating systems, energy efficiency measures and the replacement of things like kitchens, bathrooms, boilers, roofs, windows and doors.

Mortgage repayments

Is the interest we pay on the borrowing that we have used to build and acquire homes.

Voids (empty homes)

We always have some homes that are empty, we call them voids. This can be for lots of reasons, like the amount of work needed to make them into a good quality home for the next residents. We want people to move into our empty homes quickly, so we work with partners to find someone looking for a home, prepare their tenancy and make sure the home is ready and safe for them to move into as quickly as possible.

We renovated 537 empty properties last year and welcomed 659 new residents.

On average it took 48 days to relet a home.

Unfortunately, we lose some money from empty homes because we can’t collect any rent while the home is empty.

Our target is to have 30 empty homes or less each month. At the start of 2022 it was over 50, and as a result our void loss in 21/22 was 2.13%, which is higher than our target of 1.10%.

Some of this is because after Covid there was an increase in the number of homes becoming empty, due to people’s circumstances changing.

Bad debt?

Bad debt is the amount of rent and service charges that are owed to us, but we have been unable to collect. This amount was £376k during 21/22. Rent collected for the year was 97.15% against our target of 97% owed to us during 21/22

£376k

Number of homes by category:

We built 66 new homes

90%

90% of residents were satisfied with their new home

At one of our new developments (Glasdir) as part of our social value work, we’ve:

Created a trainee engineer post: Currently on their 2nd year of training and will qualify fully next year, living only 300m from the site.

Ensured that 60% of the sub-contractor workforce is local (within a 20-mile radius) 25% within 15 Miles and 15% within 35 miles.

Ensured all directly employed labour is local to the site (within 20-mile radius).

We’ve been awarded £473K from the Energy Redress grant scheme to provide energy support to 3000 households and roll out energy training to 300 frontline staff.

Together we will:

 Make it easy for people to access energy advice through a one stop referral process

 Provide support for applying for discounts, setting up payment options and accessing grants

 Support people to deal with energy providers to get the best tariff, switch tariffs and deal with complaints

Usually, we get 58% of the money to build new homes through grant funding, and we borrow 42% of the cost of the build. We then use some of the rent from the new house to pay off the loan over a long period just like a mortgage.

Over the year we spent £17,307 on new flooring for 23 residents.

Following the success of the pilot we’ve now committed to providing downstairs flooring in all new developments.

 Maximise income through benefit checks and signposting

 Provide emergency food, gas, and electricity support

 Utilise social prescribing and wellbeing support to improve people’s health outcomes

38%

Key achievements:

Established a Welcome Centre for 80 Ukrainian refugees, in partnership with Gwynedd County Council. We were proud to lead North Wales’s response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis.

Established a new homeless service in partnership with Conwy Council. The Bell supports 6 young homeless people

Developed

our Women’s Aid service in Flintshire by establishing a brand-new crisis house for women in need. As well as extending the bathrooms in our existing service to accommodate mothers and their children.

Established an ICAN Hub

in partnership with the Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board Located in Rhyl it supports people suffering with their mental health. So far, the hub has supported over 500 people with over 1,600 interventions

Developed a new parent and baby service in Wrexham to support single parents.

In partnership with Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board & Gwynedd County Council we have established a hospital step-down service for 12 patients that don’t need to be in hospital but aren’t quite ready to go home, based at our Penrhos Extra Care

In partnership with Shelter Cymru, we’ve established a new early intervention service aimed at preventing homelessness in Denbighshire.

We also helped: 75 of our supported living residents to move into a permanent home

38 of our supported living residents to attend a course or take an apprenticeship

31 of our supported living residents to sign up to college and university courses

67 Children across our schemes

39 of our supported living residents to enter fulltime employment We have offered 9 Work experience placements and attended 7 schools across North Wales to support interview workshops or career fairs.

12 Babies were born while living with us

Our employability strategy aims to deliver the best services for our residents through building our future workforce. We want to create inclusive communities and opportunities for residents through employability, and champion the housing sector as a great career. To achieve this we are working with key partners who have helped us to:

Support 6 young people with learning disabilities through Project Search and since then 5 of those have successfully secured paid employment.

Our approach to social value

Our approach to social value

Support 6 young women to join the We Mind The Gap Programme, which provides paid employment and life coaching for one year. 3 have gained employment following the programme.

Work with Creating Enterprise to offer 4 Kickstart placements and support 3 people into paid employment.

Our Corporate mission is to beat poverty and our social value framework focuses on 4 main themes:

Our Mission

Our

Providing value for money is key to what we do. We want to make sure that every pound is spent as effectively as possible so we can have a bigger impact on our communities. Our new social value strategy takes a proactive approach to ensuring social value is embedded in our procurement process for buying goods and services.

Social Value Scope

Activities and services that go above and beyond to deliver social value outcomes that contribute to our povery priorities and mission to beat poverty.

ClwydAlyn is regulated by the Welsh Government and is required to submit an annual Self-Evaluation to demonstrate how we comply with each of the performance standards set out in the Regulatory Framework.

During the year, Welsh Government introduced a new framework for regulation with revised scoring and categories. ClwydAlyn was one of the first to be asked to go through the new framework and we were ranked as ‘Green’ for both financial management and governance - the highest assurance possible.

ClwydAlyn is incorporated as a Charitable Community Benefit Society under the CoOperative and Community Benefit Societies Act 2014 and is a Not for Profit.

Operating margin (money left over)

Despite disruption from Covid, our operating margin for 2021/22 was just over 20%. Money left over is a good thing... because we use this to finance, adapt and do work on more homes for more people. It also makes our lenders more confident in us and allows us to borrow money at a lower interest rate. ��

The association meets the regulatory standards and will receive routine regulatory oversight.

We are a member of Community Housing Cymru (CHC), and we follow their Code of Governance

We also:

Retained ‘A Stable’ credit rating with Standard and Poor’s (this is good)

Retained A3 rating from Moody’s (this is an unsolicited rating) (this is also good)

Drew down £10 million from deferred sale of our corporate bond

Agreed a further deferred drawdown of the bond with £20m due in May 2023 and £20m in November 2023. New homes are built using a mixture of borrowing and government grant funding.