Home: News & Events: News

Housing associations and organisations in the social housing sector are faced with the challenge of providing affordable homes of the highest quality while making the best use of available resources.

Regulation of the sector impacts upon a wide variety of factors affecting your operations, including the setting of rent levels and the minimum service and quality standards expected, while ever-changing financial regulation requires that you keep ahead of the game and continue to deliver financial probity.

By their very nature, many housing associations are, or certainly have been, heavy investors in their most valuable assets - capital assets and human resources. Changes in the wider economic environment, which are out of your control, have tended to have a very significant impact on the sector in recent years:

• while some have been able to take advantage of lower interest rates on those elements of their loan portfolio held on variable arrangements, others have seen their interest receipts diminish considerably; and
• with little prospect of a very rapid recovery in capital markets, most associations with defined benefit pension schemes are having to find ways of absorbing additional pension costs or finding other alternatives to deal with this issue.

Our expert team have been helping to provide a focus in these areas throughout the sector. Our social housing team leader, Justin Crowley, has been working closely with clients in the sector for over 13 years. Justin aims to work alongside your management team and Board to help you in the following areas:

• external and internal audit services;
• consultancy in respect of emerging financial issues;
• provide tailored corporate governance/controls/risk arrangement reviews;
• training services for staff and/or Board members;
• specialist counter-fraud measures;
• provision of sector-specific taxation advice; and
• transaction services (mergers and acquisitions).