Welcome to Housing Matters

This spring we increased our tenants’ rent by 7%, in line with the Government’s below-inflation rent cap. This is the highest rent increase since I joined Broadland 20 years ago.

But unfortunately, our costs of running Broadland are going up much faster than 7%. In the last year we have seen the cost of our activities increase by more than 10% and in some cases over 14%. Some of our electricity contracts have increased by 300%, which is extraordinary. We have also seen significant increases in the interest we pay on our existing loans from the banks, which we have used to build and buy the homes we own. In real terms, even a 7% rent increase is a reduction in our income. This has forced us to increase our service charges to tenants.

With food, energy and other basic costs of living all rising steeply, we were very aware of the impact of the rent and service charge rises on our tenants. In March I wrote to tenants individually, explaining the reasons for the rent and service charge increases and the impact of rising costs on our services.

We set up a dedicated Rent and service charge rises page on our website, with answers to tenants’ frequently asked questions (for example, how the new rent amount might affect Universal Credit payments) and a temporary direct enquiry link to our Housing team for individual circumstances. We also created a Cost of living help webpage, providing details of local and national support organisations, from food bank locations to tips for keeping warm in winter.

The constraints on our budget mean that some planned upgrades are regrettably on hold. Our focus over the next year will be to continue with our reactive maintenance and works required to comply with the Government’s new building and fire safety regulations. Collaborating with Norfolk Fire and Rescue, we have created several innovative short videos to help tenants understand how to stay safe in their home in case of a fire.

Sadly, another casualty of the cost-of-living crisis will be in the number of new homes we will build. Instead of building about 150 homes every year, the new annual target will be approximately 50 new rented and 25 new shared ownership homes.

I hope that the situation will have improved by next year and that inflation and energy costs will have come down. Meantime, we continue to do all we can to provide homes for people in housing need in Norfolk and north Suffolk. In the spring we were pleased to hand over the keys for a total of 12 new 1-bedroom homes for people who were formerly sleeping rough to our council partners in Norwich and Breckland – see page 04.

As part of the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures, we will be surveying all our tenants this summer and autumn and will submit the results to the Regulator of Social Housing. The Regulator will use the information to assess our quality of service to tenants, and their views on it. See page 4.

Finally, this year we celebrated the completion of our Canary Quay project, which has recently been named Residential Project of the Year in the Constructing Excellence Norfolk 2023 awards. This is a fitting recognition of a collaborative project spanning 13 years and providing 323 new homes, a mixture of social rent, shared ownership and open market sales, on a former industrial site on the Norwich riverside (see page 4).

We are also celebrating our 60th anniversary this year and we will be interviewing some of the tenants who have lived in their Broadland homes the longest. In our tenant magazine Door to Door, we will be giving away some special 60th birthday souvenir tote bags in a prize competition.

I hope you enjoy reading the magazine.