Despite the many economic challenges in the UK and the world generally, in the last couple of years we’re pleased that Futures remains in excellent financial health. Despite high inflation, rising interest rates and certain supply chain constraints we’ve been able to manage these issues and even use them to further strengthen our finances and do more for customers, through successful planning. This includes continuing to manage risk associated with contractors by carrying out more work ourselves and managing our debt portfolio to remove more expensive legacy loans without having to incur penalties.
Our operating surplus fell during the year to £17.3m in line with our expectations - down £3.7m on 2021-22. The reduced surplus is due to a range of factors including increased expenditure on homes and extra cost of living payments for our staff.
Our development ambitions have also been affected by the challenges in the UK. Delays in construction and increased mortgage rates both contributed to building fewer homes than we had planned in the year. We sold fewer shared ownership homes as a result. However, even though the construction industry is facing many challenges at the moment, we’re delighted that we’ve continued to forge ahead with our development programme and have a healthy pipeline to deliver more homes in the coming years.
We remain committed to becoming a more sustainable organisation. During the year we invested significantly in making customers’ homes more energy efficient. This commitment has been built into our long term business planning. Our work on sustainability was boosted through our successful bid for funding under Wave 2 of the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. This £3m grant funding enables us to invest even more in customers’ homes.
All-in-all we’ve worked hard to keep our finances strong during this financially challenging time. This means we can face our own future with confidence and continue to deliver more homes, invest more in existing homes and neighbourhoods and continue to offer vital support services to our customers. See our breakdown of incomings and outgoings for the last financial year below.
