Matt Cooper, tax and treasury director at social housing enterprise Places for People, will be talking about navigating refinancing and ESG targets in a heightened risk environment on the second day of the ACT Annual Conference.
Here, he tells The Treasurer about PfP’s ground-breaking financing strategy and how ESG is at the heart of his organisation.
As the UK’s leading social enterprise, we engage and utilise all parts of our group – which includes regeneration and development, property management, and an extensive footprint of leisure provision as well as the heart of our organisation, affordable housing – to create and support thriving communities across the UK.
Places for People (PfP) takes a whole-community approach but with affordable housing right at our core. Managing and developing social housing, but looking right across our organisation, and building partnerships, we have a model that aims to be more than the sum of our parts. Our purpose is to enhance the communities that we serve.
In the last financial year, the group delivered 1,775 new homes, owning and managing 231,000 properties with 500,000 residential customers and saw 1.9m monthly visits to its Places Leisure centres.
As a strategic partner of government agency Homes England, we have grants that we can deploy around the country, so we are not fixed to one location. We have that flexibility, and we can also learn different things from different local authorities and different geographies. It is a real advantage to have that breadth and national presence and, of course, partnerships.
We had been keen to diversify the investor base, and we had issued a private placement in the US and done deals in Asia, Australia and Europe. Then, a few years ago we began looking at our banking portfolio – most housing associations are banked with the traditional high street names, and most funding is secured.
Some of our facilities were secured, some were unsecured, so we wanted to put in place a fully unsecured revolving credit facility, replicating how a normal corporate would have its arrangements. We had trailed the syndicated RCF before then, so it was just a case of pulling everything together, and it was something that we could do fairly quickly.
PfP’s approach was to arrange bilateral RCFs, moving the existing bank agreements towards unsecured facilities, bringing in new banks. When this had reached a critical mass, the idea would be to turn it out into a single facility.
ESG is at the core of what we do, it’s nothing new to us, having issued a use-of-proceeds sustainability bond in January 2022, which was raised for developing new housing and retrofitting existing properties. There is a lot of interest in the ESG linkage, but we were keen not to do that on our bilateral facilities because then we would have had many potentially different metrics, but for the new RCF, it would have been difficult not to have included ESG.
The metrics cover areas such as energy efficiency and employment, which are designed to be stretching but achievable. Our sustainability team was fantastic and helped explain the story to our investors.
PfP operates in a challenging market and remains committed to helping its customers amid rising living costs, working alongside local authorities to ensure that they can claim the benefits to which they are entitled as well as launching its own hardship fund. Ultimately, we are determined to ensure we continue to have a positive impact in our communities and for our customers.
Matt Cooper is tax and treasury director at Places for People and is speaking at the ACT Annual Conference 2023 about his experiences on Wednesday 17 May at 13:55. PfP won the overall award at the recent ACT Deals of the Year awards for the refinancing of multiple facilities into a first for the social housing sector – a debut syndicated £900m fully unsecured ESG-linked RCF.
Comments have been taken from an article first published in Issue 2, 2023 of The Treasurer magazine. For more great insights, members can log in to view the full issue. If you're not an ACT member, you can sign up for eAffiliate membership.
