Victor da Cunha
Our Chair

During my second year as Chair of the Local Space Board, service levels and working patterns have stabilised as we emerge from the pandemic. We focused on establishing our strategic ambitions and received another strong credit rating and excellent regulatory judgement. We remain on a strong footing, both operationally and financially. The Board made several proactive strategic decisions to support our future, enhance customer services and improve the quality of our homes. Key to these was the decision to return all homes managed and maintained by others to our internal teams, allowing us to take direct control of our homes over the next few years.

We approved a new Customer Engagement Strategy, to increase the range of activities offered and strengthen the ‘line of sight’ between Board and the customer experience. Demand for affordable housing in London remains high and the number of families in temporary accommodation is growing in our areas of operation, so we will continue working with our strategic partners, to explore how we might achieve further growth. The Board is clear that Local Space needs to play an active part in helping solve the London housing crisis and eradicate the use of poor-quality temporary housing for homeless families in our areas of operation.

I want to thank the staff and Senior Management Team for helping customers stay safe, provide essential landlord services, and let more new, good-quality homes for families in desperate need of a home. I also want to thank our local authority partners, the GLA, our lenders and other strategic partners who support us in delivering affordable and quality social housing to people on low incomes, helping lives and communities to change for the better. You remain important to us and we look forward to working with you in the year ahead.

Finally, I want to thank my fellow Board and Tenants’ Panel members who have kindly given their time and wisdom to support our continued endeavours. Working alongside our residents we continue to build on our excellent foundations and deliver our strategy in partnership with you into the future.

Josie Parsons
Our CEO

The past year has been a great deal more normal than the last couple, albeit a new normal. Local Space has settled into a hybrid mode of working, although we will continue to review this to ensure that our customer’s needs are met.

We have seen some key successes over the past year. This has included the transfer back to in-house repairs management from the London Borough of Newham for around 720 homes. We can see that those customers are more satisfied with the repairs service they are receiving. In 2024 the remaining elements of managing those homes will transfer back to Local Space.

We have purchased 45 new homes and refurbished 41 of these, making them available for more homeless families. We have continued our investment program in our homes and have added a program of energy efficiency investment to help make our homes cheaper to run for the families that live in them. We successfully bid for nearly £1 million of grant funding through the Government’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero which will enhance this program over the next couple of years.

We are working on a new program of leased homes to house even more homeless families in one of our key boroughs, and this is expected to increase over the next couple of years.

We are also working on improving all the services we offer to our customers and can already see the positive impact of this work on how our customers speak about us.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our Local Space staff for all their hard work over the past year.