Corporate Plan 2023-26
Our Story:
2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of Golding Homes, following a stock transfer of homes from Maidstone Borough Council. Since then, we've invested more than £283m in regenerating our homes and neighbourhoods.
Today we own and manage over 8,500 properties and provide a home for more than 29,000 people. We're committed to putting our customers at the heart of everything we do and to delivering excellent customer service. We believe strongly in the benefits of being a local community-based landlord, with strong local partnerships that help us to provide sustainable homes and communities.
Vision:
Golding is efficient, local, visible and listening
Our Values:
• We care
• We welcome new ideas
• We take pride
Our operating context
The operating context remains challenging, and we don’t shy away from that. Demand for affordable housing continues to grow in the south-east, alongside levels of homelessness. Financial hardship for many of our customers remains real. Our customers also have increasingly complex support needs. Population changes influence the type of homes and support services that will be needed. The largest area of growth is for older people living with poorer health.
The wider economic position of the UK is likely to remain challenging for several years, with ongoing instability this year. We’ve carried out a rigorous budgeting exercise to match resources to priorities. We’re committed to carrying out active financial planning to manage these risks and keep control of costs to budget.
The sector will see more change.
2024 sees the welcome introduction of new consumer regulation standards that will be overseen by the Regulator for Social Housing. This brings a renewed emphasis on customer focus, transparency, good operational management, and local neighbourhoods which, as a community-based landlord we’re well placed to respond to.
Delivering our Corporate Plan
We’ve made progress over the first year of our plan to better understand our business, people, systems and most importantly the demand and needs of our customers. We’re using this knowledge to change and improve and respond to the widespread changes in our sector.
Our focus for year two of delivering our three-year corporate plan will remain on our three interlinked strategic objectives:
- Excellent customer service
- Safe homes, sustainable communities
- Efficient, high performing organisation
We’ll develop our operating model for customer contact, housing management and neighbourhood services, and repairs and maintenance. We’ll continue to develop effective customer engagement and increase our visibility on estates. This will build our customers’ trust in us.
We’ll invest more in our homes and estates to improve the quality of living for our customers. This will increase our customer service and satisfaction as repairs demand is reduced.
We’ll continue to play our part in tackling the housing crisis by building new homes that meet local housing need. We're maximising our local impact by developing in Maidstone and the immediate surrounding areas. Find out more about development opportunities.
We’ll improve how we use data, review our IT roadmap to ensure technology supports our new operating model, and continue to upskill our colleagues to deliver great service to customers.
Success of this plan will be tracked using a range of measures covering satisfaction, perception and organisational efficiency.
Excellent customer service
By 2026 we’re aiming to make significant improvement in all of our core operational services. Our operating model will ensure we’re using insight to target and tailor services to customer needs. Our philosophy is ‘right channel, right customer’, responding to customers’ needs. High volume transactional services will be provided through a quality digital offer to make it easy for customers to do business with us, ensuring digital delivery becomes a channel of choice. This enables complex services and more vulnerable customers to benefit from face-to-face service delivery. Efficiencies released by more effective service delivery will be used to boost our operating margin and to invest in more specialist services.
In 2024/25 we’ll:
Embed the customer strategy and deliver the first phases of our new operating model.
• Deliver ‘Making it easy’ contact management
• Develop ‘Local and listening’ neighbourhood model
• Embed our customer strategy and engagement framework
• Improve our customers’ perception of Golding through ‘listening and acting’ on customer feedback
• Complete total repairs review and process redesign
Safe homes, sustainable communities
By 2026 we’ll have invested an additional £44.5m in our homes. This will mean all our homes meet current decent homes standards and we'll aim for 84% to be at EPC C. We’ll also have delivered 570 new homes to meet local housing need.
In 2024/25 we’ll:
Improve housing quality, safety, and costs of management.
• Invest £22.5 million in our homes
• Improve thermal efficiency of homes, with 80% at EPC C (or higher) rating
• Deliver proactive case management of damp and mould
• Develop 168 new homes
• Start multi-million-pound Cambridge Crescent regeneration
• Prepare for SHIFT Platinum rating in 2026
Efficient, high performing organisation
By 2026 we want an operating model that delivers organisational efficiency and effectiveness to underpin service excellence. Our systems transformation will have delivered the underlying connectedness and simplicity that makes it easy to do business and our ‘one team’ culture will ensure our people can give their best for our customers. We’ll have achieved an operating margin of 25%.
In 2024/25 we’ll:
• Deliver data transformation programme
• Review and update our technology roadmap
• Embed cultural programme for engagement and productivity
• Invest in leadership and colleague skills
• Launch insourcing programme for customer facing activities
• Deliver our Value for Money and financial strategies
• Deliver our Treasury plan to support stock investment
• Mature our approach to procurement and contract management
• Develop and deliver a strategy for commercial portfolio