Financial Operating Review
Five-year summary
The five-year summary shows our continually strong financial position. In the five years from 2021, the business has delivered strong operating surpluses. Changes in turnover between years primarily reflect first tranche and market sales activity that had been in our pipeline in addition to the annual rent uplift. We expect to see smoother growth in turnover as we deliver on our current development pipeline that provides a consistent number of new rented homes and those offering low-cost shared ownership options.
Over the last five years, operating surpluses have been consistently over £20m. This represents a strong operating performance within a backdrop of economic and political uncertainty. Fundamental to this has been the delivery of our core social housing lettings activities which have maintained a strong performance and increase in our low-cost home ownership units which has increased by 52% in property volume and also 5 times in surplus contributed to the overall profitability.
Long-term liabilities are detailed in the financial statements and reflect government grants, pension liabilities and the market value of financial instruments. Creditors over one year reflects the increase in loans over period, driven by our required investment in existing and new properties. The pension liability relates to our Local Government Pension Scheme, which has been closed to new members since 2003. While we are not in a deficit position, the inability to recoup any residual surplus once the scheme is finished means we cannot legally recognise the positive year-end position.
The sections below provide a deeper analysis of the key financial elements of Settle’s business:
Turnover and surplus
Turnover has remained strong and grown by 42% over the last five years, with the most significant growth in the last financial year which reflects the increase in unit numbers, in particular shared ownership and the release of the community benefit fund during the year.
Whilst the operating margin has remained steady throughout the period and consistently above the sector’s global average. The 2024/25 margin at 30.1% is above the budgeted position of 24.0% which evidences prudent business decisions and efficient management of resources despite the difficult economic challenges and rising regulatory requirement around homes standards and damp and mould. During the past year, there has been increased spend on repairs due to higher costs and demand, increased investment in the quality of neighbourhoods, particularly to support grounds maintenance and cleaning of communal areas, and additional spend to proactively resolve damp and mould issues. The increased cost is softened by the shared ownership sales and income generated from the completed home from our running pipeline.
Turnover breakdown
79% of our turnover in 2025 relates to social housing lettings, reflecting the continued commitment we have to the provision of truly affordable rented properties.
Our conscious decision to move to a development strategy that focuses on affordable housing rather than market sale can be clearly seen from looking over the past 5-year performance. We have focussed our attention on delivering much-needed affordable housing which provides reliable income streams.
Assets and debt
During the year, we have completed additional borrowing, which allows us to continue our commitments to increase the supply of affordable homes in the areas in which we work, and to invest in existing homes and neighbourhoods that are great places to live in.
Liquidity
Settle's treasury strategy includes strict targets to ensure that sufficient liquidity is in place to fund at least 18 months of future commitments. We continually review our position to ensure funding is available to achieve our development strategy.
As at 31st March 2025, our overall liquidity headroom was £136.8m, equating to 34 months of committed development spend against our policy target of a minimum of 18 months net development spend.
Drawn debt breakdown
Settle currently has £454m of drawn debt, split between bank loans and bonds. The long-term nature of our debt portfolio ensures there is limited refinancing risk in the short to medium term.
82% of our portfolio is currently fixed by either stand-alone derivatives or fixed rate bonds. This represents a comfortable mixture of interest rate management and flexibility within the debt to take advantage of potential fundraising opportunities.
Operating Review
Investment in existing assets
As our financial review demonstrated, Settle is a business that is fundamentally focused on affordable housing. The provision of genuinely affordable rented homes remains the core component of our business.
As our 2030 plan sets out, delivering resident-focused services and providing safe, warm homes, is of huge importance to us. This means that we continue to invest in our existing stock.
An important aspect of this is through planned investment. We continued to invest in resident’s homes and spent as planned, £15.6m on updating homes in 2024/25. This is comparable to the £19.7m we spent in 2023/24, £14m spent in 2022/23, £8.3m in 2021/22 and around £4m in 2020/21.
We finished the year achieving our year-end target for replacing kitchens, bathrooms, windows, front doors, and heating systems, with a small number being completed in the first quarter of 2025/26.
The total completions as budgeted for in 24/25 were: 414 windows; 76 fire doors; 14 roofs; 162 kitchens; 78 bathrooms; and 504 heating systems.
As we have noted in previous reports, our long-term financial plan is aligned to the results of our stock condition surveys. A focus during recent years has been to increase the number of stock condition surveys we have across all properties, underpinning our knowledge of homes and investment plans.
Our target was for 100% of surveys to be within five years old by the end of 2024/25, and we achieved 90% at year end. These surveys are carried out by Settle colleagues. Progress was slowed during the second part of the year due to challenges recruiting to a stock condition surveyor vacancy, and with gaining access to some properties. Our revised aim is to achieve 100% surveys within 5 years by the end of the second quarter in 2025/26.
As our 2030 plan sets out, delivering resident-focused services and providing safe, warm homes, is of huge importance to us.
Service delivery
In 2024/25, we completed 100% of emergency repairs within the target timeframe.
We finished the year completing 69.5% of routine repairs within target.
Repairs productivity has been a focus during the year, and we complete the reporting period seeing service improvements with further progress expected into the next reporting year.
Settle benefits from having an in-house Direct Labour Organisation (DLO), and we often see higher satisfaction from residents when repairs are completed by these colleagues. However, we have reported some challenges in recent years with meeting the targets we had set for completing routine repairs, which was for these to be completed during an average of 28 days. During 2024/25, we completed an extensive review of the service which was conducted by independent consultants. The full-service review highlighted that some investment works, which were not directly repairing a defect within the property were defaulting to a 28-day priority at the point of raising works. This in turn meant that some repair appointment slots were taken by longer-duration works, contributing to an increased reliance on sub-contractors and pressure placed on the repairs teams to deliver some larger jobs.
To address this, in December 2024 we revised and realigned repairs priorities to better reflect sector standards, also republishing a detailed repairs service standard available to all residents on our website.
We have also introduced new measures to improve the productivity of our DLO, including enhanced scheduling, more geographically efficient appointment booking, and improved works order management.
We completed the reporting year seeing increases in team productivity and work classification. As a result, the service moved from an average of 2.1 jobs per person per day to 3 jobs per person per day over the last 4 months of the year. The target for year end 25/26 is 3.5 jobs per person per day which would put the service in the upper quartile.
These improvements have helped to bring routine repairs closer to target levels at year end, and we expect to achieve this during the year ahead.
We also closed the year seeing increased satisfaction with the repairs service as monitored through the Tenant Satisfaction Measures, and a reduction in the number of complaints around repairs, due largely to the updated repairs standard published in December providing greater clarity and better managing expectations around the repairs service provision. We have also seen a change in culture across the DLO, particularly around commercial awareness and improved decision making by colleagues around how repairs are best delivered and communicated to residents.
Condensation, damp and mould
At the close of the 2024/25 financial year, there were 263 open damp and mould cases, 134 fewer compared to the 397 cases at the end of 2023/24, representing a 33% reduction.
Whilst we continue to see a decline in the scale and complexity of cases, and estimate that works related to resolving damp, mould and condensation have been carried out in over 20% of properties, our focus remains on proactively supporting all residents to raise requests for support with damp and mould. We continue to remain in touch with residents throughout the resolution process, until we are confident we have addressed the root cause of each issue.
Our Board continues to ensure we have the resources in place to support any resident experiencing damp and mould for as long as needed. As part of this, we expect to recruit additional resource during the year ahead to support our handling of cases related to damp and mould, to meet the requirements of Awaab’s Law.
Voids performance
Voids performance in terms of turnaround times ended the year at 45.92 days for major voids (excluding Flexicare properties) against a target of 38 days and 24.22 days for standard voids (excluding Flexicare properties) against a target of 14 days, both measured from possession to relet of tenancy. Void loss – our target for the year was 1.1% and we ended the year well within this, at 0.83%.
We continued to see properties returned requiring larger scale works; coupled with our focus on repairs productivity during the year, we have seen average turnaround times across all voids remain higher than target. It will be a focus to review and deliver improvements in this area during the year ahead.
Decent Homes Standard
We finished the year with 99.97% of homes meeting the Decent Homes Standard at the end of March, against a target of 100%. Just 3 homes were non-decent, due to operational delays in the delivery of windows. These will be completed in Q1 of the 2025/26 financial year.
Supporting Settle residents
We see commitment from colleagues across Settle to provide wider support to residents, focused on helping to sustain tenancies and being there when residents need us. As highlights demonstrating this across a busy year, we:
- Consistently maintained arrears levels under 3% target, ending the year at 2.4%.
- Introduced our in-house Money Advice Service in December 2024, with 126 cases opened - achieving savings for residents.
- Achieved 95% resident satisfaction with the lettings process of our homes
- Completed 200 tenancy audits, ensuring we contacted any resident we had not heard from for 6 months or more
- Supported our most vulnerable residents on 319 cases, a 147% increase compared to 2023/24.
- Supported 721 residents through the comfort fund, used for one-off purchases of essential household items.
- Took over 64,000 calls - answering 86% of the calls we received
- Investigated 159 cases linked to Community Safety, 61% more than 2023/24. Satisfaction with our handling of Anti-social Behaviour as reported through the Tenant Satisfaction Measure surveys increased by 5.5%.
- Achieved £4.9m social value equivalent, thanks to the combination of all these actions, a £1.8m increase on 2023/24.
Development and sales
We delivered 242 new homes last year (17% Social rent, 29% affordable rent and 54% shared ownership). This shows an increase on the 212 new homes delivered in 2023/24 and 218 new homes, and one commercial unit, delivered in 2022/23.
Our development focus during the past year has remained on our current geography, properties within 45minutes of our offices in Letchworth Garden City. This has included new homes in our North Hertfordshireheartland, including through our regeneration programme at John Barker Place in Hitchin, as well as completing developments in growth areas including Central Bedfordshire.
We continue to see a high demand for our shared ownership product as a means for people to access home ownership in a market where they are priced out of purchasing on the open market. Last year we recorded average void sales times of 105 days (against a target of 90 days – some schemes were launched later than planned due to delays on site) and saw an average of 36% first tranche sales. This demand continues to help cross-subsidise the development of affordable low-cost rented properties as well.
We remain committed to increasing the supply of affordable homes in the areas in which we work, doing so in a financially responsible way that continues our focus on investing in quality homes and neighbourhoods. As of 31 March 2025, we are contractually committed to over 500 of the homes we will be building over the next five years.
Supporting and developing skilled housing professionals
In our Strategic Report, we outline how we have continued our focus on managing and investing in our people to grow a professional, diverse and inclusive workforce, in particular through our Housewarming Programme, CPD expectations of all colleagues and supporting colleagues to achieve CIH qualifications.
Throughout our work, we aim to recruit and retain skilled colleagues, providing a great place to work where they are given the tools, training and support to provide excellent services to residents.
A summary of other areas we have focused on during the past year include:
- Peakon surveys – providing real-time insights into colleague experience, showing strong levels of engagement and pride in working at Settle. Our regular pulse and annual surveys continue to guide our priorities and shape better experiences.
- Completing a sector-aligned benchmarking review to keep our reward and recognition offer competitive and support recruitment and retention.
- Introduced new recognition initiatives sponsored by our Executive and Leadership Teams to make sure colleagues are being recognised with good new stories shared across the organisation.
- We've embedded better tools and systems to support smarter decision-making and better people data — including a new ATS system and insight dashboards.
- Our colleague-led networks continue to support belonging, wellbeing, and creativity. These groups comprise our Together We Care Champions; Value Everyone Group; Colleague Forum; Innovation Forum; and Mental Health First Aiders.
- We are proud to finish the reporting year having completed development of our Service Styles project. Co-created by colleagues and residents, this will be a cornerstone of how we work together — bringing together our commitment to professionalism, customer experience, and culture by defining the service standards colleagues can expect from one another, and what residents can expect from us.
SHIFT accreditation
During the year we also undertook our fourth SHIFT (Sustainable Homes Index For Tomorrow) accreditation and were pleased to again be awarded Silver. The analysis also identified where we could continue to progress, and we continue to work towards achieving SHIFT Gold status by 2027.
More information on our approach to environmental sustainability is provided in the ESG section of this report.
Social Purpose
Social purpose remains at the heart of Settle. Through our giving something back approach, colleagues spent just under 1500 hours combined volunteering their time across a range of activities including volunteering with schools, cub groups and children’s activities and supporting local charities.
As part of our giving something back approach, we also continued our focus on neighbourhood action days. This included a new approach to this activity in late 2024, when we combined our Big Door Knock and Neighbourhood Action Weeks in the Jackmans, one of our biggest neighbourhoods in Letchworth. Activities focused on improving estate standards, with colleagues from teams across Settle taking part. Activities including tidying communal areas, litter picking and planting flowers. We also unveiled a new life-saving defibrillator, the second we installed during the year close to Settle homes, and both of which we funded through the JE3 Foundation. We were pleased to be joined by local councillors and residents during some of these events to support the work we were doing.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion
Through every part of our work at Settle supporting our colleagues, residents and communities, we are committed to ensuring that all individuals have an equal opportunity to make the most of their lives. Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) plays a central role in supporting the delivery of our social purpose and sits at the heart of everything we do. Our culture at Settle is inclusive and embraces and celebrates the differences in everyone.
Creating a diverse housing environment ensures that all community members, regardless of background, have access to equitable housing opportunities. By reflecting the demographics of the populations they serve, housing organisations can better understand and meet the unique needs of different groups, fostering a sense of belonging and trust within communities. This year we introduced our new value 'inclusive,' highlighting its importance to Settle's culture and our commitment to residents. We recognise that diversity within a workforce improves the performance and productivity of organisations, we aim to appoint and develop leaders that reflect the diversity of the people they lead, the customers they serve and the communities in which they are rooted.
We continue to support the work of our ‘value everyone’ group which looks at celebrating diversity amongst our colleagues. Additionally, we continue to provide training and development opportunities to raise awareness of diversity and inclusion related topics. Some of our focus points over the next year include:
- Embed a culture of continuous learning around EDI.
- Expanding our reach for new talent, and improving our recruitment practises to remove unconscious bias decision making
- Taking an open and unbiased approach to diversity and inclusion as part of our people strategy.
We continue to fully support the importance of greater transparency and disclosure on ethnicity pay as part of a business’s environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. We report on ethnicity pay in the same way that organisations are required to report on gender pay, using the same calculation methodology set out by the Government Equalities Office.
We remain committed to doing everything we can to further narrow the gap and provide an inclusive environment that supports people to work and develop successfully, which includes the following:
- Our flexible working offer means that colleagues have more freedom and support to attain a worklife balance that meets the needs of both their family and the business.
- Where relevant our policies and processes will undergo an Equality Impact Assessment to ensure fairness and equality.
- We are continuing to invest in a learning culture that promotes and celebrates diversity and inclusion. The work of our value everyone group is a big part of this. We support all colleagues through every stage of their Settle career we offer opportunities in both personal and professional development which is fair, transparent and inclusive for all.
- We appointed our first female apprentice into our DLO workforce this year with the intent to increase diversity in trades, an area which is traditionally dominated by males.
- We are actively participating in the National Housing Federation’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion network to keep up to date with best practice among EDI professionals in the sector and bring that learning back to Settle.
- We are bringing the recruitment function inhouse and implementing a new applicant tracking system which will allow us to anonymise CVs to minimise unconscious bias. The new Talent Acquisition Partner will champion inclusivity in our external branding and monitor diversity in the recruitment process.
- We have implemented a neurodiversity and a health & wellbeing passport to keep a record of agreed adjustments to colleagues’ roles, to enable them to reach their potential.
- Based on a report by Autistica, we plan to review our working environment and our recruitment processes to increase inclusivity.
Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap
The Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 require relevant UK employers with 250 or more employees to publish information on their pay gap. Although there is no legal requirement on us to publish an Ethnicity Pay Gap report, Settle is doing so voluntarily in the spirit of transparency and in order to identify any inequalities and take meaningful actions to address them.
We know that to support the delivery of our purpose requires a diverse and inclusive workforce in which a wide range of different voices are being heard at every level of our business. We continue to make active efforts to address the gaps that exist in our business, striving to ensure that every colleague is able to succeed at Settle. Our combined Gender and Ethnicity Pay Gap 2024 report can be found on the website at Our pay gap report 2024 and provides a snapshot of colleague data from 5th April 2024.