Bromford 48 Regulatory News (42RA)

Bromford Housing Group's response to the coronavirus outbreak

The coronavirus outbreak has created new challenges for Bromford and our priority is to keep customers and colleagues safe as we continue to serve and protect our communities.

At the start of March, we established a dedicated senior leadership group, led by our Chief Risk Officer working closely with our CEO and CFO, who meet daily to assess the impact of the coronavirus outbreak and proactively update our response as the situation evolves.

This update outlines the operational changes we have made to provide ongoing essential services whilst maintaining safety and compliance with government regulation. It also sets out a high level view of the financial impact of these changes and how this will be managed.

Supporting customers, colleagues, and communities

· Our dedicated neighbourhood coaching team continue to provide focussed support to customers. They have identified and are in regular contact with our most vulnerable customers to offer support around the government guidelines as well as signposting them to advice on Universal Credit, dealing with symptoms of loneliness, and ensuring supplies of essential food and medication. Coaches are also providing information on additional local services such as community groups, neighbourhood schemes, and volunteer assistance

· Our neighbourhood coaches are also increasing engagement with homeowners, shared owners and those in part-time or self-employment to provide advice and guidance on the government's financial support measures

· Our specialist support teams are working with care partners to ensure the effective operation of any accommodation for older or vulnerable people. This includes people living in Extra Care housing, Retirement Living and MyPlace accommodation. Schemes remain open to family for essential food and medication visits and have been operating on a time-slot basis to ensure adequate social distancing, whilst on site restaurants have quickly adapted to a take away service for residents 

· We have continued to operate essential services to ensure the safety of our customers. This includes emergency repairs, gas servicing, fire risk assessment, legionella, lift and electrical testing, and landscaping where it is required to ensure safe living and communal spaces. All engineers are fully equipped with the latest Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and have changed the way they work such as adopting stringent infection control and hygiene practices and travelling individually to a customer property

· Our empty homes team have made properties available so that we can help reduce homelessness, support key workers needing to self-isolate, and accommodate people moving back from hospital in order to free up hospital beds

· Our strong existing culture of flexible and remote working, supported by a robust ICT infrastructure, enabled the successful transition to working from home for over 97% of colleagues within a week of the revised government guidance.

Financial impact and planning

· We are continuing to understand the full financial impact of changes to our operations on our near and long term business plan. We have modelled a number of immediate "lockdown" scenarios and will develop further analysis as government policy on the extent and period of the lockdown and measures to encourage economic recovery are confirmed. We are confident we can manage the challenges ahead, supported by our:

- Strong levels of cash and liquidity (in excess of £500m of which £180m is cash)

- Sector leading A+ and A2 credit ratings, both with a stable outlook, with regular and proactive discussions with both agencies

- Robust and prudent controls on the level of WIP and sales exposure

- Agile business plan which can adapt to new development scenarios and market conditions as they emerge

- Detailed business continuity plan which is reviewed continuously

- G1/V1 governance rating by the Regulator for Social Housing along with a successful recent in-depth assessment in November 2019

· We have an established track record of managing our rent collection and low levels of arrears through our proactive income team and neighbourhood coaching programme, as evidenced in our current net arrears level of circa 2%. We expect arrears will increase but we will attempt to mitigate any impact by the personalised support of families through their dedicated neighbourhood coach and our income team

· We expect lower planned maintenance costs in the short term as we re-profile this activity. We also forecast a reduction in our development costs and a fall in our projected sales income as a result of site closures and reduced development activity in the near term. We expect to manage these challenges in a controlled manner: our development plan is agile and can be reconfigured as we do not hold significant levels of WIP and our exposure to open market sale is limited. We are also supported by our strategic partnership with Homes England which led to a de-risking of our plan over the past 12 months

· We will publish our year end trading update on 11 May 2020.