We are delighted to share our first annual report as Beacon Cymru Group Ltd for the year 2024–25. In the report you will find information about how we performed over the last year, and how residents have helped to shape the work that we do. During 2024 both housing associations - Coastal Housing and RHA Wales – advised you about our proposed merger and following consultations with residents, colleagues, partners and stakeholders (individuals or groups who work with us), we successfully completed the joining of both organisations and formed Beacon Cymru Group Ltd on 2nd January 2025. As Beacon Cymru we will be stronger and better placed to manage future challenges, and importantly we are creating new and exciting opportunities to grow and improve the services we offer you.
We want all our residents to be satisfied with the services we provide and understood the merger would bring its own challenges around the way we work, so we engaged with residents by phone, post, email, online, and through our website as well as “in-person” events to ensure we kept everyone updated on progress during 2024, and early 2025. Residents told us what is a priority for them:
- Ensuring the merger didn’t affect the service that residents receive from us – specifically wanting to see services stay “local” and housing officers remaining accessible.
- Beacon maintains and improves standards of service delivery - especially repairs, estates, cleaning etc.
- Overall residents were happy with repairs but identified areas where estates could be improved and we can strive to do better.
- A need to communicate effectively around any changes in the new organisation.
An area of concern for some residents during the last year was antisocial behaviour, so this has been an area of focus for the team at Beacon. In the past year since we formed, our Community Safety Team hit the ground running; organising a series of events in coordination with support from various Beacon Teams and as a result, we’ve made a significant impact on how antisocial behaviour, safeguarding, and domestic abuse are managed. Throughout the last year we continued to work together in the Lettings, Neighbourhood, and Repair teams to relet our homes as quickly as possible:
We want to ensure the homes we provide are energy efficient, safe and secure. We have Welsh Government Welsh Housing Quality Standard and one of the priorities is to make sure our homes keep residents warm, as well as being eco-friendly and better for the environment. Our resident engagement team have been working to ensure communication is clear and accessible so residents’ expectations and queries are understood and answered quickly. Working with residents we developed a ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ guide and new webpage so we can share news and communicate promptly when needed. For more information visit here.
Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating, is a measure of a property's energy efficiency on a scale from A (most efficient) to G (least efficient). It indicates how expensive a property is to heat and light, estimates running costs, and provides recommendations for improvements to lower energy bills and carbon emissions. Since the tragic Grenfell fire, all housing associations need to work to new building safety laws, all of which come at a cost. We have a dedicated Safety Team who are making progress on this important area of work, they are also working with our Resident Engagement team on a project to explore how we communicate fire safety information with residents in high rise apartment blocks.
Learning from resident feedback
It is never nice to think that residents feel the need to complain about their services but when they do it will be with good reason, so the new Beacon Cymru complaints standard has already been introduced across part of the organisation and will be used by all teams by the end of 2025.
We have continued to see high levels of need for our rent and support services, and we are responding more flexibly and creatively to the challenges communities face.
The cost-of-living crisis has continued to hit communities we work in, so we were pleased to support the creation of the first Multibank in Wales, Cwtch Mawr, in 2023/24 and to increase that support in 2024/25. Cwtch Mawr means ‘Big Hug’ in English and is a community donations hub offering support for families experiencing financial difficulty. Cwtch Mawr works with charities and housing associations to provide items such as warm clothes, hygiene products, school uniforms, and bedding to people who need them, these items are donated by businesses like Amazon.
During this same time, our Rhondda based community hub - Little Shed in Tonypandy has continued to offer support to people in the local community, being a warm place for people to visit and providing friendship to those who have been isolated and lonely. This year the space has welcomes 6740 visitors, including :
- 4141 visits to access community fridge. Saving approximately 17,471.4 kg of food waste going to landfill.
- 1152 visits to access ‘Cuppa & a Chat’ warm space sessions.
- 568 people attending craft sessions.
- 336 volunteer sessions offered.
- 179 people attending wellbeing sessions.
- 81 people accessing ‘Library Of Things’.
- 68 people taking part in games morning
- 52 people visiting for general advice and queries.
- 35 people taking part in cooking sessions.
Physical adaptations
We have completed 227 home adaptions in 2024-25, meaning individual homes are assessed and where possible redesigned to help residents lead independent, healthier and happier lives.
Our process for adaptations involves assessing the urgency for work, and gives priority to: • Diagnosed life-limiting disease • Palliative care • Delayed discharge from hospital • Sudden ‘life-changing’ injury • Urgent replacement of existing adaptation used daily e.g. hoist, stairlift, specialist bath
The overall development programme within Beacon Cymru has had a successful year, and in our new corporate plan our aim is to build 500 homes each year. In June 2024 we were pleased to welcome Julie James MS to our redevelopment at Eversley Road, Sketty for a visit ahead of its completion in December. This project brought 13 much-needed apartments to this popular Swansea suburb, whilst refurbishing a public car park crucial to servicing nearby businesses and providing the area’s first public EV charging points. Other key developments in the last year included new homes and commercial units at King’s Road in Swansea’s SA1 Waterfront and at 61 Kingsway in Swansea city centre and a significant build of 70 new homes in partnership with Tata Steel at Pemberton in Llwynhendy. These homes have been designed with support from Swansea University’s SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre to ensure high levels of energy performance for residents and minimise the environmental impact during the construction process.
More recently we have the redevelopment of one of Swansea’s iconic buildings – the Grade II listed Castle Cinema, to provide 30 new homes alongside commercial space. Beacon Cymru is mindful that this Grade II listed building – within a conservation area – has real architectural and historic importance and will develop with that in mind.
Across Rhondda Cynon Taf, development of The Big Shed project in Tonypandy has now gathered pace, and will deliver 51 homes alongside commercial space supporting the wider regeneration in the town. Our development partner, Willis Construction, has been a shining example of how we can achieve community benefits; working within local schools, colleges and communities and adding to the real sense of excitement this project will bring. Similarly, we are partnering with Jones Brothers (Henllan) to bring about 70 new homes at Hafod Wen, Tonyrefail – an area of particularly high demand for our homes.
Image: First minister visiting the Big Shed development project in Tonypandy
Social Value
All our regeneration and schemes are aimed at supporting and investing in our communities. Every time we appoint a contractor to build for us we work with them on what we call a social value project – this means we work with local communities in the areas we build to find projects which may need a bit of extra support. It’s really important to us that these projects have a positive impact not only on the local community but also where possible the environment too, as this can only be beneficial for the future. Take a look at what’s been achieved:
In 2024 before merger, both Coastal and RHA boards focussed on ensuring that the merger would ensure residents continued to receive high quality services. We have been clear that this merger demonstrates strength and the coming together of two associations who are anchored and committed to communities. We carried out due diligence: which means looking at each other’s financials, performance, policies and processes. The work that was carried out demonstrated to both Coastal and RHAs Boards that the decision to merge was the right decision, and together we really can do more. A new board, called a Shadow Board, was formed in autumn 2024, and met several times pre-merger to agree and oversee our future plan, ensure we had resources in place and approve the organisations governing documents, policies and procedures. In 2025 the Beacon Cymru Board’s focus was on the delivery of the merge, Beacon’s first corporate plan and ensuring the Executive Team have the tools and resources to deliver on objectives. We are ensuring the residents voice is heard in the Boardroom and that as a Board and an Executive Team, we are making the right decisions for both residents and colleagues. There will be challenges ahead, with new laws and legislation around things like fire safety for example, and greater expectation on repairs to homes and the environment. We want to do more and do it better but also in a way that ensures we manage risks well and plan for future risks. A new Beacon Risk Register has been developed which will be key to us making the right decisions and taking managed risks to deliver the best for our residents. The risk register will be reviewed and updated regularly to make sure it is always relevant to the work we are doing and the environment we are working in.
Beacon Cymru’s board will annually complete a Self Evaluation, where we consider our performance and if we have complied with Welsh Government’s Regulatory Standards and Code of Governance. Every three years, we have an external governance review, where experts in governance review the performance of the Board and the wider governance arrangements. As a newly formed organisation, we have decided that we would like our first external Governance Review to be held early in 2026, to ensure we continue to have the skills, knowledge and resources to be able to serve the organisation, its residents and its colleagues.
One of our objectives following merger was to create a dedicated area of our business called the Transformation and Business Insight Service which is focused on better understanding resident’s needs, identifying ways of working more efficiently and effectively, and improving services whilst keeping up to date with the latest in innovation and technology to provide residents with the best service experience. We are delighted that this new team has now been established, and work is underway in the following areas: Understanding residents needs and making decisions
By analysing feedback, complaints, and service demands, the team aims to identify what residents need and value the most. This will help us to be more proactive and to tailor services like repairs and support, as well as communication methods and digital access to better meet expectations. We are also working on improving and cleansing the data and information that Beacon stores so that we can analyse it and provide reports on trends like housing demand, condition of homes and maintenance costs. This will help Beacon plan better and ensure we are investing in the right places at the right time. Understanding our performance and being transparent We have developed a new way of reporting performance that uses dashboards and is more transparent and accessible for Beacon’s Board, Staff and residents. This will help us to know if the work we are doing is making a difference in the way that matters, and give residents confidence in our services and trust in the information they are receiving.
In this time of climate emergency, we have made a continued commitment since the merger to reducing our carbon footprint and our impact on the environment, and have recently produced a new strategy to focus our work in this area. We were also delighted to have received UK Government funding which enabled us to launch our Greener RCT project, running from 2023 to 2025. The project offered educational activities and opportunities that highlighted the importance of working to change habits and make better choices to combat climate change. We worked across RCT, in partnership with local businesses, schools, colleges, the construction industry and community groups to deliver 3 aims:
- Educating local people on the impact of climate change and the importance of climate action
- Researching and designing a ‘Green Skills’ career pathway in maintenance and construction
- To action change locally through testing and trialling a ‘Green High Street’ in Tonypandy
Finance
Where we spend rental income We are ensuring that our funding strategy (where our money comes from and how we spend it) places in a strong position for the future and security of Beacon Cymru - for our residents, our colleagues and partners. We are doing all we can to ensure we are supporting local.
Most of the performance information featured in this report is from Beacons data collecting team. More detailed financial performance information can be found in the 2024-25 audited Financial Statements document. If you’d like to learn more, take a look here.