The Regulator of Social Housing has today (15 February 2024) published its value for money metrics and reporting for 2023. The report sets out how much housing associations invested in new and existing homes in the last financial year, and highlights the importance of boards making the best use of their resources.
Despite the economic challenges they faced in the year, housing associations continued to reinvest their operating surplus to improve existing homes and build new ones.
The report shows that in 2023 housing associations:
- Invested £12.5 billion in new and existing homes (16% more than the previous year)
- Delivered over 48,000 new social homes (up by 7%)
- Spent an average of over £4,500 on each social home (up by 14%) as they continued to invest in repairs and maintenance and deliver their strategic priorities.
As a result of this higher spend, median interest cover fell to 128% (the lowest level since 2010). The trend has continued into the current financial year, as shown in RSH's recent quarterly survey of housing associations' finances.
RSH requires housing associations to report annually on their performance against a suite of value for money metrics. RSH publishes this information so that boards and other stakeholders, including tenants, can assess how each housing association is performing against its peers.
Will Perry, Directory of Strategy at RSH, said:
Housing associations are grappling with a range of economic challenges while working to provide more and better social homes for people who need them.
This creates competing pressures on their finances, and boards need to explain how they are allocating their resources and adding value. Our report allows stakeholders to scrutinise their landlord's performance and hold them to account across a range of areas.
RSH's value for money report is available on its website.
Notes
- RSH's Value for Money metrics and reporting covers private registered providers of social housing (housing associations), excluding for-profit private registered providers. It does not cover local authority registered providers.
- Value for money is one of RSH's standards and the report sets out housing associations' performance against it, covering the year up to 31 March 2023.
- The Value for Money report is part of RSH's continuing work to help the sector contextualise the performance of individual providers more easily. It aims to help boards compare themselves to organisations with similar business models and geographical locations. It is an annex to RSH's Global Accounts, published in December 2023.
- Along with the report, RSH has published data for individual private registered providers. This is provided in the Value for Money metrics data file. The report is also accompanied by a detailed Value for Money technical note, which explains the metrics in greater depth. These documents and all previous Value for Money publications can be found on RSH's VFM collections guidance and reports page.
- RSH promotes a viable, efficient and well-governed social housing sector able to deliver and maintain homes of appropriate quality that meet a range of needs. It does this by undertaking robust economic regulation focusing on governance, financial viability and value for money that maintains lender confidence and protects the taxpayer. It also sets consumer standards and may take action if these standards are breached. RSH's remit on consumer issues is expanding and from April 2024 it will begin carrying out regulatory inspections of social landlords.
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