Our Annual Report 2024/25: Making The Onward Difference
In your Customer Annual Report, we share examples of the work that we have done to improve your homes, neighbourhoods and services during the last financial year. Our focus is enabling customers to be their best, in homes they love, and places they are proud of. Over the next few pages, we set out some of the ways that we are making this a reality.
Your feedback is important to us and we are listening to what customers are telling us about our services. There are examples later in this report of how our involved customers are helping us to make our services better from improvements to repairs to the ways that we handle complaints.
In 2024/25, we continued to invest in customers’ homes and spent £87.7 million on repairs and improvements. We own many ageing properties that can be difficult to heat and manage. Over this period, we completed improvements to 290 homes across all regions, which will make these warmer, more comfortable and easier to run.
Our country faces a housing crisis and we are committed to helping even more people to find a place to call home. Over the last twelve months we have built 434 homes, our highest annual total. These include a mix of a mix of affordable rent, social rent, rent to buy and shared ownership to reflect the different needs of our communities.
We have also brought more of our services in-house with gas servicing moving from contractors to Onward Repairs. We have also introduced new technology in response to customer feedback to make it easier to track the work that Onward Environmental carries out in your area.
In the next few pages, we share information on how we are performing in different areas. This year we have seen continued high demand for our homes and services alongside the significant financial pressures faced by our sector. Our priority is balancing these pressures whilst targeting homes most in need of investment and continuing to make improvements to services. We must take a careful approach so that we can make The Onward Difference well into the future.
Whilst our performance data shows some signs of improvement, we know that there is more work to be done. It will take time for all customers to fully feel the benefits of the changes that we have made to our services. We hear what you are telling us about where we need to improve and have significant plans in place to do so.