Barratt understands that during the current economic uncertainties providing affordable homes is essential for our customers. Therefore our aim is to ensure that our customers can have access to the best available mortgage products to finance their purchase. We employ a Head of Mortgage Lender Relations to develop our strategy in this area and deliver highly targeted initiatives, whilst continually developing relationships with the major national lenders and local lenders on a divisional basis. We aim to increase lenders’ confidence in new build and in Barratt as their preferred partner for their lending. We also recommend that customers use a limited panel of specialist New Build brokers who can offer specialist financial advice.

All our divisions and brokers have implemented our group-wide processes for dealing with lenders and surveyors. These ensure that we provide them with transparency in relation to our products and the financial arrangements between the Group and our customers. These standards and processes exceed the industry requirements as specified by the Council of Mortgage Lenders. We have extensively refined and audited these processes to ensure that we can effectively hold ourselves accountable for the quality of mortgage business submitted on the security of Barratt properties.

In addition to existing lenders, we actively pursue relationships with new lenders to the UK new build market in order to support the development of new financial products. Most recently this has taken the form of affordable ‘top up loans’ on a secured and unsecured basis that give customers access to alternative means of bridging the deposit gap.

Over the last five years our customer surveys have shown a continued increase in satisfaction of our performance and we were pleased to achieve 98% Recommend a Friend score during the year ending 30 June 2011, achieving our 2010 target of 97%. All customers are contacted independently around nine weeks after legal completion and asked to complete the survey. Scores are monitored monthly in order that we can assess our performance.

We were also pleased to retain the HBF maximum Five Star housebuilder status for the second year running across Barratt Homes, David Wilson Homes and Ward Homes, showing that over 90% of our customers questioned were satisfied with the quality of their new home and would recommend us to a friend. Barratt were the first national housebuilder to achieve this and we have maintained this status for two consecutive years.

Barratt work hard to maintain high levels of customer service and in 2010 we set a target to trial a programme to enhance our customer experience at development and divisional level. This programme was called ‘Winning Customers for Life’. During the year ending 30 June 2011 the programme was developed following an in-depth analysis of our customer survey results and the verbatim comments customers have made, when purchasing a home from us. We analysed what actions our teams took that resulted in good scores and also what had happened when we did not meet expectations. The programme has established a clear ‘customer journey’ and identified the significant ‘moments of truth’ that our site teams need to focus on in order to deliver great service and exceed customer expectations.

We intend to continue rolling this programme out during the next year in order that we maintain a 98% recommendation on our own survey and retain the HBF Five Star award for a third year running. Both of these goals are very important to us as we want to ensure our customers are satisfied and recommend us to their family and friends. High levels of recommendation will ensure that we continue to build trusted brands and a sustainable, long-term business. We will continue to measure our success every month using our own internal telephone based customer survey. Results are reported across the whole business every month and rigorously followed up with action plans. From an external perspective we will continue to benchmark our performance via the HBF customer satisfaction survey.

Both brands have been updated in the last 12 months with internal layouts designed with modern living in mind, providing plenty of free-flowing living areas and natural light. Our tasteful external designs are drawn from rich architectural movements from past eras. Tested with consumers and well received, we are now starting to roll out a new range for Barratt Homes with two external design styles and one for David Wilson Homes.

Strong customer feedback has indicated that Barratt Homes remain great value for money, offering customers high quality practical living space with what they have described as ‘generosity of design’. We work hard to ensure the proportions of rooms are large enough to accommodate our typical customer’s furniture requirements whilst ensuring our external designs are aesthetically pleasing. Due to smart, ergonomic design a Barratt customer can expect a wide range of the features usually associated with bigger, higher priced homes creating great value for money.

Following customer feedback, our David Wilson family homes have been provided with more generous circulation space that delivers an overall sense of grandeur and ‘arrival’, such as more ‘indulgent’ kitchens, ‘full’ en suite bathrooms with larger baths and use of multiple roof lights in bedrooms.

The online market continues to develop and change at a rapid pace. Consumers have greater expectations of what they can and should be able to do online and Barratt aspires to lead the new build sector in this area.

We will continue to develop our online user experience and quality of content through greater use of e-brochures, video, 360 degree tours, extensive imagery of planned developments and house types in addition to comprehensive information about the local area.

In the last year we have significantly increased the information provided online by introducing extended content pages for our developments; this is set to continue with more content planned. We also wish to use our digital offer to help make the customer experience of buying a home easier and simpler. We intend to develop a number of ways that will help make moving easier. Simply put, we want to make it easier to choose, buy and move into a new home.

We have already invested heavily in our online offer and technology at our sales centres. Over the next year we will deliver a range of online improvements including richer content and a number of service tools. At our development sales centres we will upgrade our technology further to ensure that our sales advisers can make the sales process as smooth and simple as possible.