Our social impact
There are some things that are hard to put a number on, and when we think about some of the work we do in supporting customers, it can be difficult to work out the value it creates.
If you’ve had a look at our Customer Annual Review for 2022-23, you’ll notice that we’ve included the £28m of social value that we’ve generated for the communities we serve by delivering projects and initiatives that help improve lives.
But what does this mean, and how do we work it out?
We, like other housing associations across the UK, use the Housing Associations’ Charitable Trust (HACT) method for working out how much social value we produce through areas such as supported living, retirement living, employability, new homes, community investment and more.
Using this tool, we get a value for certain outcomes and we add these up to get a total. This is based on the overall benefits to someone’s quality of life, health and wellbeing, and positive impact on the community.
For example, helping someone who is experiencing homelessness find a permanent place to live or helping someone find a job so they can have a more independent life.
Why measure it?
Measuring social value helps us to show the human impact of what we do, but also shows you, our partners and our staff how important the work we do is.
The range of customers we support is huge, so making sure we’re doing everything we can to help them and their communities thrive is important in making sure that everyone has a place they can call home.
In return for this work, we can demonstrate its importance with social value like this one:
This kind of work has been especially important in the last couple of years as we’ve helped customers through some difficult periods.
The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis has put a huge strain on households across the country, and we’ve been adapting and changing our services to help people tackle debt, improve their wellbeing, learn new skills, find new homes and more.
You can find out more about how we measure our social impact just here.
If you’d like to take a look at some of our other financial information, check out this page of our Customer Annual Review 2022-23.