We have announced another set of strong half-year results for the six months to 30 September 2022.

The period saw us record turnover of £141m, successfully meeting our budget, and in line with the same period last year. Turnover from social housing rose £7m to £119m, delivered at a margin of 35%, and contributing to 84% of our total turnover for the period.

Our overall operating margin excluding asset sales remains in line with the prior year at 33%. Adjusting for one-off strategic disposal of homes outside of core geography last year, operating surplus grew from £53m to £56m. The disposal of these homes and withdrawal from these local authority areas was one of the key objectives of our strategy to allow is to focus our attention on our core areas where we owns higher numbers of homes.

We retained our G1 / V1 ratings during the past half-year and continues to have A+ and A2 ratings with S&P and Moody’s respectively. During the half-year we also published our inaugural sustainability impact report, Building a Sustainable Future, which adopts the Sustainability Reporting Standard and sets out progress against our Sustainable Finance Framework. The report confirms that with 86% of our homes already with an energy efficiency rating of C or better, we are now aiming to reach 100% by 2028.

As well as continuing to invest in its existing homes, our half-year results reported another strong period for housebuilding, having completed 509 new homes in the first half of the year, all for affordable tenure and 107 of which were delivered by its in-house construction team. We remain on target to deliver another 1,200 new homes by the end of the year, a similar figure to the number we built in 2021-22.

Chief executive Robert Nettleton said the results mean Bromford is well placed to face the challenges of the months ahead with the cost-of-living crisis, rising inflation and the potential rent cap. 

“We have responded to government on the consultation for the rent cap and have pro-actively modelled the impact of the proposed levels of cap, rising inflation and higher costs of new funding. As a fundamental component to this work, we are implementing a strategic cost review to identify efficiency savings across the business. We will do this whilst we continue to support our colleagues and without compromising delivery to our customers as we work through the challenges we face with the rising cost of living.”

Paul Walsh, chief finance officer, added: “We are pleased to have maintained our strong financial performance, with our social housing revenue growing from £112m to £119m, delivered at a core social housing margin of 35%.

“Whilst we expect some slowdown in sales activity as mortgage rates continue to rise, we are well on our way to meeting our annual sales target of 220 to 240 homes, with 158 sale completions in the period.”

Director of treasury Imran Mubeen added: “"As we continue to drive our sustainability agenda, we have adopted the sustainability reporting standard and published our first sustainability impact report Building a Sustainable Future. We look forward to delivering our report as an annual update to set out further progress over the coming years

“As we develop new iterations of the business plan, we proactively run our shadow credit analysis to identify routes to safe harbour on both ratings in the single A space.”

The six-month period to the end of September 2022 covers the time during which we experienced a cyber incident after a malicious attempt to access its systems. But Mr Nettleton said that throughout the incident Bromford kept providing services to customers.

Robert Nettleton added: “The training and planning we had in place enabled us to identify the issue early to ensure there was no data breach and allowed us to meet our obligations to our customers whilst we systematically investigated and reintegrated our technology. We maintained a 100% compliance record across all areas of health and safety. Our neighbourhood coaching service was supplemented by a dedicated customer contact line to respond to emergencies.”