Anne Turner – Group Finance and Resources Director
Having had a couple of weeks off in September, I’m now back to work, refreshed and raring to go. In my absence my diary has been helpfully packed with various meetings, both internal and external which will keep me busy in the period up to Christmas. It’s the start of the budget and business planning cycle now and this year it’s particularly difficult, given the change in political climate and the many and varied announcements hitting the press about cuts to come and efficiencies to be made.
Orbit is in a sound position to deal with the potential tax changes which will come our way next year. However, we are also keen to increase our investment in homes and services to meet increasing needs and to do this we need to generate real efficiencies.
We are tackling this in a number of ways, a few of which are highlighted below:
- our procurement team are working closely with maintenance staff to reduce overall costs through effective tendering and bulk purchasing. This will ensure that we can maintain our asset programmes despite rises in VAT from January
- we are reviewing the way we administer and deliver a number of our services to make them more efficient and reduce duplication and bureaucracy
- we are investigating ways of working with other partners to share services and thus reduce overall costs
- we are looking to take advantage of current low interest rates whilst protecting ourselves from future interest rate rises.
All of the above will be built into next years budgets and plans and will help us meet and improve our day-to-day services to customers. However, if we are to continue to invest in new homes, we also need to attract more grant funding and raise new loans. So today I attended our annual Lender’s Day which this year was held in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Orbit has a number of key funders and this was our opportunity to show them what we are doing and highlight some of our recent successes. Not only does it give them a better insight into our work and vision, but it enables them to meet our finance and development staff. Finally they get the chance to visit some of our recently developed schemes and look at some of our new proposals. All in all it was a very successful day with everyone leaving being extremely complimentary about us which was great to hear and hopefully this will mean really competitive funding quotes when we go out to the market early in the new year!
