Connexus Annual Report 2021

The Coronavirus pandemic has dominated all of our lives this year, and I’m incredibly grateful to my colleagues at Connexus for adapting and maintaining services as much as possible during this time. Despite our best efforts, our restricted ways of working following Government guidelines has unfortunately resulted in a backlog of repair requests. Thankfully, now that restrictions have largely been lifted, our Repairs and Maintenance team are making significant inroads into resolving this.

In last year’s annual report, I was optimistic that the Regulator would look at our governance grading this year. However, they have postponed this review, not due to any specific concerns, but due to the work we were doing to bring all housing associations under the Connexus umbrella, into one organisation; Connexus Homes. It’s likely, the Regulator will now carry out an “In-Depth Assessment” for Connexus later in this calendar year.

The consolidation of the housing associations in the group into one company was an early aim of the 2020-23 Corporate Plan which was approved by our Board in March 2020. This work was important as it gave us the opportunity to make savings in back-office costs and to ensure our focus for Connexus is clearly on what matters to the customer.

During the year, the Government issued the Social Housing White Paper and we were really pleased to see that the key focuses linked clearly with our focus on the customer, with the overarching themes being building and resident safety, as well as resident voice. Safety will always be the number one priority for us. We carry out an extensive number of checks on our homes to ensure that our customers are as safe as possible.

We’re also a strong advocate of the voice of the customer and were really proud to be early adopters of the National Housing Federation’s “Together with tenants” initiative. I’d like to thank all of our customers who have taken the time to review our services, through completing surveys, or responding to consultations through our new interactive software on our website. Being a rural housing association with a vast geography, I appreciate that it may seem difficult to give meaningful feedback but I can assure you that we’re committed to listening and acting on what you tell us.

One of our key priorities is to improve the homes for our existing residents. A significant amount of work has been carried out in the year through stock condition surveys to allow us to programme in work needed over the coming years to manage this. In addition, we have a development programme of around 250 new homes each year (this was reduced in 2020-21 due to the pandemic).

Our work with residents and in the community is hugely important to us. Two highlights in the year were the opening of the Young Persons Service in Hereford and the continued success in difficult times for the Shropshire Domestic Abuse Service, which forms part of Connexus.

Over the next year, we’ll be delivering the remaining objectives set in our 2020-23 Corporate plan and establishing with the Board the long-term focus. Clearly, as part of this, customer and stakeholders’ views are fundamental, and I look forward to hearing from you during that time.
Thank you for your support during an incredibly difficult year.

Stay safe.

Richard Woolley, CEO