Cut to the point

There was an important point missed in your article on English Churches Housing Group last week (22 October, page 11). You said ECHG could not afford to give staff a pay increase in line with inflation because of cuts in the Supporting People programme.

A pay increase was due earlier this year. ECHG depends on £23m of funding from Supporting People. At the time the funding cuts, and the way in which local authorities had chosen to implement them, had not worked their way through to ECHG, but they were anticipated by us. For this reason we simply did not know what level of pay increase we could afford at that stage.

We decided to offer an initial 2% and revisit the issue once we knew our half-year financial results. We are now reviewing the offer in light of that information, as planned.