Investing in Your Home: Our Three-Year Plan

Over the next three years, our planned maintenance programme will focus on keeping residents safe, looking after our homes and making sure we invest where it is needed most.

Like many housing associations, we are working in a challenging environment, with rising costs and new legal requirements. This means we need to carefully prioritise how and where we invest in our homes.

Health and safety will always be our main priority.

We will focus first on essential works that help keep residents and buildings safe, including:

• Fire safety remedial works
• Structural repairs where issues have been identified
• Other essential works needed to reduce risks to residents or buildings

These works help us meet our legal and regulatory responsibilities and, most importantly, keep residents safe in their homes.

We will continue to invest in important improvements to kitchens, bathrooms, windows and other key parts of our homes.

However, replacements will be based on condition and need, rather than age alone.

This means that if a kitchen, bathroom, window or other item is still safe, usable and in reasonable condition, it may not be replaced simply because it has reached the end of its expected lifecycle.

We will consider replacement where an item:

• Presents a health or safety concern
• Is in poor condition
• Is affecting the use or comfort of the home
• Is no longer cost-effective to continue repairing

We understand that this may be disappointing if you were expecting an upgrade based on the age of your kitchen, bathroom, windows or other fixtures.

We want to be open about how these decisions are made.

By looking at the actual condition of our homes, we can prioritise investment where it will make the biggest difference. This helps us:

• Direct investment towards homes and works that need it most
• Avoid replacing items that are still safe and working well
• Make responsible and fair use of our resources
• Reduce the risk of more serious problems developing in the future

Where continuing to repair something is no longer cost-effective, or its condition is affecting safety, use or comfort, replacement may be the better long-term solution.

We will also look for opportunities to make our homes more energy efficient and help reduce fuel costs where possible.

This may include carrying out energy-efficiency improvements alongside other planned works where it is practical and provides good value.

These improvements will also support our longer-term net zero and Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) targets.

We want residents to understand what work is planned, why certain works are being prioritised and how we make our decisions.

We will continue to communicate with residents before works take place, listen to concerns and explain the reasons behind our decisions wherever we can.

By taking this approach, we can focus our investment where it matters most: keeping residents safe, maintaining homes properly and making sensible improvements that support residents and the long-term future of our homes.