Finance & Performance
The Association’s mission statements describes the association as a housing organisation providing culturally specific services, primarily to vulnerable black and ethnic minority families and individuals in urban areas. We promote cohesion, empower our communities, raise aspirations, improve the quality of lives and ensure our customers have the opportunity to access high quality services. During 2009/10 we have managed to maintain and followed our core purposes.
This year has seen the effects of a difficult economic and climate where accessing loans and the slump in housing have adversely affected the social housing sector. However, due to prudent financial management and careful use of resources we at Shian have managed to open a number of developments with new partners and deliver a good service with experienced staff.
We have continued to improve our services to our tenants by adhering to our Service Charter when dealing with them. Our aim is not only to deliver good services, but be a happy organisation, this has extended to our tenants who enjoyed a seaside day trip in August organised by our staff. We have fulfilled an outstanding aim of providing more quality homes through our partnerships with larger associations, we were able to build and complete 30 new homes. For the first time we entered into the intermediate rental market, as 18 of the new homes were let to key workers.
Our accounts are healthy and we have increased our turnover by 16.2%. Our duty to provide good quality housing has been seen in our increased investment in our stock, we now have a 5 year rolling programme for cyclical decorations which has been combined with our major repairs programme. The major repairs programme is due to commence in 2010/11 with a focus on the properties that we purchased or developed under various short term initiatives in the past, such as the Housing Market Programme, Existing Satisfactory Programme and Major Repair Transfers. We spent over 250,000 pounds on this so far, as we prioritise high quality homes for our tenants.
Our governance structure has been reviewed to ensure that we have the decision making framework to deliver our core housing services as well as our supported and community projects. This approach to governance is an important element of our preparedness for the TSA standards set to come enforce in the next financial year.
These accounts show that we can go forward into the next financial year with a good basis for further improvements to our housing services and expanding our community programmes. We will continue to be prudent in our treasury and resource management, under the leadership of the senior management team at Shian.
Our latest management accounts can be downloaded here.
