While the focus of our approach to achieving value for money is making sure that we focus on the most expensive areas of the Association, this does not mean that we ignore other areas.
Making sure that our ‘back-office’ functions, such as Finance, Human Resources, IT, and people like our Chief Executive provide good value for money is important too.
When we compared our central costs with other housing associations for 2014/15, Hexagon’s central costs per home were the cheapest in London and 21st lowest in the country. Our HouseMark central costs figure for 2015/16 is very similar, so when benchmarking data becomes available we expect that our position will be very similar.
We also want to make sure that our costs do not rise faster than our income from rent, which is going up at inflation plus 5% (the red line in the graph below). Our costs for central services (the blue line) are going down as we increase the number of homes we manage without increasing our costs.
We want to make sure that we keep it this way, and a couple of years ago we reviewed many of our central functions. As a result, we reduced the numbers of staff in our Finance, Human Resources and Facilities teams. We will look at this again when we have the detailed HouseMark benchmarking figures for 2015/16.