We’ve had a busy few months recently, culminating in us winning the Community Business of the Year Award from the North East Chamber of Commerce. We’ve been continuing to play our role in tackling the housing crisis by building more new affordable homes. Work has just started at our Seaham Garden Village site, where we’ve partnered with Esh Construction to deliver 750 new homes – half of the total 1,500 new homes planned for this new community on the Durham coast. The garden village will take a decade to complete and will include a new primary school, retail and health and well-being facilities as well as three miles of landscaped paths and cycle routes, so it is great to see work starting on site. 

We've published our Tennant Satisfaction Measures for the previous year. The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has created a new way to assess if social landlords in England are doing their job right. The measures show some strong results for us - like a 90% agreement that we treat our customers fairly and with respect, as well as strong results on safety. We will be working hard to continue to improve our services for customers over the coming year.     

We’ve also just published our Unlocking Social Value report for the year, which measures the wider impact our activities and investments have on the wellbeing of our communities. This could be through how we help customers find jobs, invest in community centres and in local services. It’s also about how we ask contractors and suppliers about they can benefit our customers and communities. We can then work with them to identify how we create opportunities that maximise social value for our customers and communities. Throughout 2023-24, we’ve been able to deliver £922,233 in social value outcomes to support our communities. We are putting even more of a focus on this going forward. We’ve got a new Social Value Panel to oversee how we deliver social value and we’ve recruited a Social Value Coordinator to help deliver our social value commitments on the ground. 

In this edition of Karbon Life, you can find out about our latest development in West Denton, our work to upgrade homes in Haltwhistle, the career opportunities we are delivering through our New Start programme in Teesside, how we are supporting men to open up through our Silver Friends group, summer holiday activities and the art trail that came to Byker.