Bromford secures new £75m sustainability-linked loan with international funder

By Peter Davison

5 July 2023

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Regional housing association Bromford has announced a £75m five-year sustainability-linked revolving credit facility with an overseas funder

Regional housing association Bromford has announced a £75m five-year sustainability-linked revolving credit facility with an overseas funder.

In a deal with Dutch lender ABM AMRO, Bromford - which operates in the Redditch, Tewkesbury, and Bristol areas – will pay a lower interest rate on the loan if it successfully meets targets to reduce the number of colleague sick days and coaches more of its customers into employment or training by 2028.

The new revolving credit facility (RCF) comes with a option to increase the facility by a further £50m, providing additional flexibility for the association to support the ambitions of its new strategy which it launched earlier this year, including its goal to build 12,000 new energy efficient homes by 2031.

The deal forms part of the company's strategy to build up an RCF base of over £350m this year as existing facilities expire, which maintains strong levels of liquidity to underpin its development and growth.

Director of treasurey Imran Mubeen said: "We’re delighted to expand our credit lines to a fifth provider, as we continue to drive diversity in our funder base.

"Our enhanced RCF portfolio will allow us to respond to new market opportunities as they emerge. We are particularly pleased to develop this partnership with ABN AMRO as we disrupt legacy conventions and continue to drive the value our sector deserves.

"ABN AMRO have already demonstrated a firm commitment to UK social housing and they will be one of our key partners who support us through our funding cycle."

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Bromford has pioneered sustainable finance in the sector, issuing the first green and first governance loans over recent years. This deal represents Bromford’s third sustainability-linked loan. The key performance indicators for the deal are driven by Bromford’s corporate strategy and recently published 2023 sustainable finance framework.

Bromford aims to reduce the average number of colleague sick days from nine days to 6.5 days and to coach 1,400 customers into employment or training by 2028.

The savings generated on the loan will be reinvested into community projects, a commitment Bromford have already demonstrated on their earlier sustainable loans where savings have already funded community work to support victims of domestic violence.

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.