We are continuing to grow and look to provide more good quality, affordable homes to people across the North East. As part of that ambition, we have proposed a new partnership with Newcastle’s Leazes Homes. The aims and values of Leazes Homes very much align with our own – in terms of providing good-quality, affordable homes and local services in a shared geography as well as our focus on supported and specialist housing. We look forward to developing this exciting partnership.
As you will have noticed, it has been a rainy few months – in fact, this winter has been one of the wettest on record and the rain has continued through March and April. This has caused a lot of disruption to our grass cutting cycle. Unfortunately, waterlogged ground causes damage to our machinery and is unsafe for colleagues which makes it very difficult for us to cut the grass. We are using lighter equipment where we can and will resume normal service as soon as the weather and ground conditions improve. I want to thank everyone for their patience.
Our development of 104 new affordable homes in Pelton is taking shape. In February we named Esh Construction as our construction partner for the £25m project. The development is on the old Roseberry Sports Community College site and will include 52 Rent-to-Buy homes alongside 31 apartments and eight bungalows for over 50s. We are really proud that the houses and bungalows will all achieve an energy performance certificate rating of A, will be fitted with solar PV panels and electric charging points and will be powered by air source heat pumps. We hope these homes will give a real boost to the local community.
We have recently enhanced the service we provide by introducing more automated texts and calls. This has streamlined our processes and freed up colleagues to support customers in other ways. We can now use automated texts and calls to remind customers of upcoming gas servicing appointments and allow them to reschedule, as well as to offer support to customers who are in rent arrears.
Below, you will see some of our key statistics for the end of the 2023/2024 financial year. I would like to pay tribute to our colleagues have done so much to support our customers, improve our existing homes and deliver more of the homes our communities need. Their hard work has resulted in a jump of 20 points on our customer satisfaction score and us achieving £1.3m more in benefit income for our customers than the £4m we had aimed for. I am proud too that we have delivered 616 homes this year – although slightly short of our ambitious target, that's more than in any year in the last four years.
In this edition of Karbon Life, you can find out about our latest development in North Shields, how our New Start project is supporting women in Middlesbrough and the community art project brightening up the Stanley Board School.
