‘We know our service has not been up to standard’ - Southern pledges to overhaul repairs and fix finances in four-year corporate plan

Southern Housing has unveiled a new strategic plan aimed at improving its repairs services, achieving the highest consumer regulation grade and fixing a £75m gap in its finances.

The 80,000-home London landlord announced the new three-pronged strategy, which covers 2026-30, this week.

In the plan document, the G15 landlord admitted that its “repairs services has not been up to standard” and it is therefore aiming to deliver a repairs service that it is highly rated by residents and efficiently delivered.

It said: “We’ve let some of our residents down in recent years with unclear scheduling and repeat calls, inconsistent diagnosis and missed appointments.

”We know our residents deserve better. In our resident consultations to feed into this strategy, the repairs service came up as the single biggest area residents asked us to improve.”

Southern said it is “looking to improve every aspect of its repairs from how easy it is to report a repair, to the quality of works delivered, and the speed with which we communicate.”

It said it is upskilling staff and overhauling systems. Southern’s annual repairs spend has already increased from £215m in 2022/23 to £363m in 2025/26 which it said has been due to regulatory changes and increased demand.

Southern said it will measure its progress by looking at performance against a number of metrics, including resident satisfaction with repairs, number of repairs ‘right first time’, number of calls from resident’s chasing repairs, repairs delivered on time, outstanding repairs and campaigns.

Southern’s Tenant Satisfaction Measure for repairs service satisfaction in 2024/25 stood at 65.3%.

The landlord also pledged to improve its balance sheet, pointing out a hole in its finances in 2024/25.

It said: “Overall our costs were £75.7m more than our income, and we funded this gap through selling assets and borrowing. This isn’t a long-term sustainable position and our strategic objective is to close the gap sustainably.”

Southern said it will “prioritise spend where it’s needed” and has already exited market rent activities and reduced its student accommodation activities.

It said “We’ll deliver on these disposal programmes as well as continuing to challenge everything we do to streamline and focus on our social housing mission.”

Southern said it will find £30m in efficiency measures, including the repairs delivery improvements. It will increase productivity in administrative activities, “support specialisation to grip key costs” and “invest in AI and automation to drive change.”

Southern said it expects the rest of the cost/income gap “will close naturally” as new developments are complete and let and its interest bill starts to reduce. Southern in 2024 paused most of its development until the group’s EBITDA-MRI cash interest cover recovers. Interest cover compares earnings to interest payments and is used as a measure of registered providers’ financial capacity.

The group’s interest cover in 2024/25 declined. Its EBITDA-MRI net cash interest cover (excluding sales) fell from 39% to 27%, although it would have been 37% had the group not written off £13m due to structural issues identified at the provider’s 60-home block at Station Approach in Woking.

The third key objective set out in Southern’s strategy is to improve its services to residents through “ better cross-team working, clarifying responsibilities, improving communication, reviewing policies and processes, and delivering more specialist training to colleagues. It is aiming to obtain the top ‘C1’ grade for consumer regulation from the Regulator of Social Housing when it is inspected in 2028.

It said it would put one staff member - “a local link” - in charge of coordinating services for every building or estate it manages, which it said will ensure “clear accountability for services to residents and colleagues”

It added: “We will also be looking at improving how we use our systems, particularly those which directly support our communication with residents, and the quality of our data.”