Annual Review 2024/2025

Work on our most ambitious scheme to date, 750 new affordable homes at Seaham Garden Village in County Durham, has made great progress over the last year and working alongside a number of key partners, we have formalised agreements for these new homes to be connected to a new, ultra-low carbon, mine water heat network. 

Paired with boasting a range of energy efficiency technologies, like solar PV panels, these new homes will be well on the way to net zero. The first units are expected to complete in the autumn, offering a mix of affordable rent and affordable home ownership options for new residents. 

Boosted by our Strategic Partnership with Homes England, which has provided us with £181million in funding to deliver more affordable homes across the region, we have also celebrated a big milestone in delivering more homes for people with additional support needs. 

Working in partnership with South Tyneside Council, we’ve completed on 21 new supported living homes, across two schemes in the borough, designed to support residents with learning disabilities, autism and complex care needs to live more independently.  

And in Yorkshire, colleagues at 54North Homes celebrated the opening of its flagship Leonora House scheme, a block of 58 high-quality flats for social rent in Leeds. 

Alongside developing new homes we’ve remained committed to investing in the quality, safety and energy efficiency of our existing homes, spending over £99.6m on planned and responsive investment. 

Meeting the government’s net zero targets remains front and centre in our investment plans and we successfully completed on a £3.6million energy improvement programme to bring 218 homes across Northumberland and County Durham over the minimum requirement of an energy performance certificate C rating.  

Part funded by a grant from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, work has included external wall, cavity, loft, and underfloor insulation, new roofs, and solar PV panels. 

In Hartlepool we’ve delivered £4.4million of investment work in 267 homes, with customers benefitting from a range of internal upgrades, including kitchen and bathroom replacements, electrical rewires and heating upgrades. 

We also began a programme of investment to upgrade our retirement living schemes for over 55s. The first scheme, Park View at Lynemouth on the Northumberland coast, received a quarter of a million pounds worth of improvements, including redecoration, new flooring and communal furniture, upgraded fire doors and a digital telecare system.

Our customer’s voice matters, and we’ve continued to develop the ways in which they can engage with us to ensure that their voice is at the heart of our decision making, shaping services and implementing change. 

We held our first ever in-person customer conference, bringing over 130 customers together from across the region to meet with our senior leadership team and a variety of our key partners to hear about what is going on in the world of housing, our approach to customer service and an overview of our finances. 

The event gave customers the opportunity to voice issues, suggest improvements and learn more about how their money is spent. 

Our customer panels and committees have continued to grow from strength to strength, providing more ways for customers to get involved with our work. 

The Karbon residents’ scrutiny panel for example, which gives customers the opportunity to check and challenge our services and suggest positive ideas for improvement, has been valuable in guiding our approach to damp and mould and our consumer regulation self-assessment. 

As the demand for digital access to information and services grows, we have continued to develop our digital offer. This year we have modernised our payment methods by introducing a suite of more straight forward and secure digital payment options from Access PaySuite, that make it easier for customers to ‘self-serve’. 

We have also implemented a variety of new digital software and tools to help improve performance and make efficiencies across the business. Implementing one AI-powered software within teams across Karbon has helped reduce colleague workload, reduce our rent arrears and increase access rates for gas servicing by 10%. 

As the cost of living continues to impact our customers, our support in ensuring they are claiming all the entitlements they’re eligible for has never been more important. Our Money Matters Team has provided a vital lifeline for thousands, generating over £6million of income gains for customers 

And in Yorkshire, to improve the repairs and maintenance service our 54North Homes customers receive, we have expanded Karbon Property Services to deliver responsive repairs and out of hours provision for our homes across the county. 

Our Karbon Homes Community Investment Fund supported 158 community organisations and projects with grants totalling over £284,000, and we unlocked £2.8m of social value contributions from our suppliers and contractors to further the support we offer our communities.  

Examples include supporting our contractors to deliver educational sessions in local primary schools and connecting suppliers with local community centres to carry out vital internal upgrades free of charge. 

Our Place Team have continued their intensive work in our two Karbon Impact Areas, Byker and Stanley, collaborating with colleagues, local residents and key stakeholders to understand how we can help facilitate long-lasting change. 

In Byker, with funding support from Historic England, we began engaging with the community on a unique art project designed to explore and celebrate the hidden history of the iconic Byker Estate. The project worked with young people on the estate, engaging them through a series of workshops to develop three pieces of public art which were unveiled this summer.

And in Stanley, we are continuing to work on ways to fuel a sense of pride in the town. Working in close partnership with our Stanley stakeholder reference group, we launched the Thriving Stanley Action Plan, designed to support regeneration of the town and improve the lives of residents.

As the Government outlined its Get Britain Working plan to tackle the current levels of economic inactivity in the UK, we celebrated the success of our latest New Start programme. 

Last year we supported 61 North East social housing residents through the programme which provides five-month work placements. We also partnered with Newcastle City Council to deliver Green Start, a variation of New Start that supported an additional 20 candidates into placements specifically within the green and low carbon sectors. 

We also developed and launched an employability support programme specifically designed to tackle issues with transport.  

A partnership with Job Centre Plus and Stanley Travel, ‘Step into Driving’ supports residents through sitting their theory and practical driving test, and then puts them through the bus driver training programme with guaranteed employment at the end. The scheme not only helps people into employment but is also boosting the number of qualified bus drivers in the area. 

Our commitment to community engagement and investment was recognised when we were named the North East Chamber of Commerce’s Community Business of the Year 2024. 

The last 12 months was our discovery phase, where we built our understanding of what we do well and where there are sticking points or inefficiencies. This coming year is the first phase of delivery, with project groups set up to cover key topics affecting teams across the organisation. 

We have continued to invest in providing the right environment and a supportive culture to help colleagues thrive. Last year our annual colleague engagement survey achieved its highest response rate to date of 64% and for the year, our Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) sat at +43. 

Scores above +40 are considered outstanding. 

We were also recognised for our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I), and named the 27th most inclusive place to work in The National Centre for Diversity’s 100 Inclusive UK Employers 2024. 

We have been working closely with NCFD to help shape our ED&I action plans and have ambitions to achieve its formal accreditation in the coming year.

Our wellbeing offer is something that we are proud of and we were pleased to achieve the Maintaining Excellence level of the Better Health at Work Award. The assessors told us it was clear that wellbeing is deeply integrated and prioritised throughout the organisation. 

Having accurate customer and asset data is vital for colleagues to be able to do the best job. To ensure the ongoing quality of our data, we launched our Karbon Data Quality Scorecard (KDQS), a purpose-built reporting tool that quantifies data accuracy across the Karbon Group. 

Building the scorecard in-house saved in excess of £100,000 and this paired with the positive impact it’s had on our overall data management saw us win the Best Use of Data category at the Housing Innovation Awards 2025. 

To support our ambitious investment plans, we increased our loan book by agreeing £189m of new facilities with three lenders. This enhanced liquidity will play a key role in enabling us to deliver our key strategic ambitions.  

We also received an affirmed credit rating of single ‘A’ outlook stable from Standard & Poors, which acknowledges the strength of our liquidity as well as our operational flexibility to mitigate external pressures.