Providing long-term houses which are genuinely affordable to those on low incomes.
Homes owned and/or in management
Most of the homes owned and/or in management are for social and affordable rent. At 31 March 2021, we had 39,830 homes across 36 local authorities of which 78% were for social or affordable rent. Working with our local authority partners we cap our affordable rents at the local housing allowance.
During 2020/21 we completed 801 new homes of which 442 homes were for affordable rent or shared ownership, the remainder were for open market sale.
As of March 2021, the homes owned and/or in management:
Homes under development
As of March 2021, we had 5,129 homes under development or identified for development, of which 4,158 are for social, affordable rent or shared ownership.
Affordability and tenancy sustainment
From 1 April 2021, we no longer issue fixed-term tenancies as we believe in offering stability to our customers via security of tenure, 20.8% of our homes currently have a seven-year fixed tenancy agreement.
Our Tenancy Sustainment team aims to help, encourage, and guide our customers, to enable them to be able to sustain and manage their homes now and in the future.
During 2020/2021, we’ve supported 99% of customers to sustain their tenancies. Additionally, we’ve secured extra items for our customers such as white goods and furniture to the value of £82k. These essential household goods go towards creating homes that support customers to sustain their tenancy.
When the pandemic began, we were the first housing provider to publicly say that we would not take any enforcement action for rent arrears caused by COVID-19. Our goal is to keep every customer in their home and during 2020, we took no possession proceedings. No evictions took place either and we ended the year with a remarkable 1.76% arrears result.
During the year, we also secured £4.6m in extra income for 2,508 households and issued £6k in heating vouchers to more than 100 families in order to support fuel poor households.
Abri is committed to reducing fuel poverty across our geography, during 2021 we completed a full assessment of households potentially at risk of fuel poverty, which is informing the development of our fuel poverty plan.
During lockdown we adapted our approach to lettings to keep our colleagues and customers safe, this included virtual viewings. Our re-let period rose to 70 days but through hard work, we reduced it to 51.9 days by March 2021. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, we re-let 1,237 properties and let 250 new builds.