If your rent is going up, it isn’t about profit.
We’re a social business. This means don’t have any shareholders, so our funds get reinvested into our homes or into the community instead.
But, as a business, we still need to balance the books.
Every year things tend to cost more. So, it costs us more to deliver the same services.
Rents go up every year in April.
You rent covers the cost of your home - this means:
- Day-to-day repairs
- Servicing equipment, doing safety checks and maintenance
- Budgeting for long-term maintenance
- Fair wages for our team*
- Paying back the loans we took out to build your home
- Supporting community services that help our customers (e.g. Citizens Advice)
- Our biggest cost is around repairs and maintenance (for every £1 rent, we spent over a third on maintenance – roughly £12m per year).
- Government guidance – the Government gives housing associations a steer on how much we can charge each year. This year, we also had advice from our trade body on rents for shared ownership customers.
- Below benefits – we make sure our rents don’t go over the amount you claim in housing benefit (this is called the Local Housing Allowance).
- Service charges cap – you might see a ‘Keeping things affordable’ cap on your service charges. This means your service charges won’t go up by more than £3 per week.
- We ask you – every year we run a consultation in November to find out what your priorities are and how rent changes might affect you.
- Being affordable is part of our core purpose. A private landlord would be charging £23m more per year in rents for the same homes.
*We don’t want to be part of the problem, so we pay the Real Living Wage. We pay the ‘median’ salary for a job: so some organisations will pay more, but we still offer a fair wage to attract good people to provide good services.
Service charges are different to rents - but we're still concerned about keeping them affordable.
Every year, before March, we look at how much we’ve spent in the year just gone and plan for any major work that we know is coming up.
Click here for more on how we calculate our service charges
We also apply a cap to stop anyone's overall service charges going over £3 per week - to keep things affordable.
Like other businesses, we have to be financially responsible and sustainable - or (eventually) we’d be in trouble.
But, unlike other businesses, we don't make a profit. Our rents are discounted. A private landlord would be charging £23m than we do more for the same homes, and we can offer lots of support if you're worried about rent.
Have a question?
If you still have questions or think something doesn’t look right in your statement, get in touch using the form on this page and we’ll help.
More rent and money advice
Rent changes in April - everything you need to know
Tuesday, 25 February 2025
Category: Money advice
