Spring is finally upon us and it is bringing with it lots of exciting progress on new homes across the region. First though, I'd like your help. We’d like more people to hear about the work we do – that’s why we’re running a competition to sign up more subscribers to this email.  Pass this bulletin to a colleague and if they sign up and let us know you referred them, you’ll each be entered in a charity prize draw to win £50 for a charity of your choice. You can sign up and find terms and conditions here.

There are plenty of exciting projects for new subscribers to hear about! At our flagship Seaham Garden Village scheme, our multi-million pound Extra Care scheme has been given the go-ahead, as have new homes at Shildon in County Durham.

We have also seen some really inspiring work to support our communities from Karbon colleagues. Recently, we have seen our fantastic Silver Friends befriending service expand into West Northumberland. It was also inspiring to see many of our female Karbon colleagues joining forces with The Girls Network to mentor teenage girls in the region.

With the end of the financial year, April gives us a chance to review our last 12 months. We continued to see strong results for customer satisfaction overall – hitting our target for a net promoter score of 42. We managed to take the average response time down from 30 days to 26 days this year but we know we must go further and there’s more work to do. More colleagues and sub-contractors and streamlined processes are helping us get to where we need to be. Rising prices and ambitious expectations on investment in our homes is putting real pressure on our ability to build new homes. We are looking at ways to unlock investment going forward so we can continue to deliver the homes communities need whilst also meeting our obligations around safety and efficiency. I’m looking forward to seeing these plans come to fruition this year. I just wanted to also highlight the fantastic work our Money Matters team have done in supporting customers to access the support they're entitled to. This year, the team secured a total of £8,245,198 of additional income for our customers - making a real difference to people and giving them the security they need. 

In this issue of Karbon Life, you can read about new homes moving forward in Sunderland, how we support customers to break down barriers to work and how hobby rooms in Byker are being given a new lease of life.