Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first half results presentation. I'm Richard Harpin, Founder and Chief Executive of HomeServe. Welcome to those of you who are with us in the room, and also to those who've joined us online. It's great to be able to report that we've had a very good six months, both financially and strategically. At our full year results back in May, we set out three key priorities for this year, and we're making good progress on all of them. Tom Rusin is here to tell you about the outstanding growth we're delivering in North America. Ross Clemmow will report on early progress in broadening and transforming our U.K. business, as well as the great initiatives we have underway elsewhere in EMEA and in HVAC. I'll update you on Home Experts. We're also continuing to focus on our responsible business agenda. Tom and Ross will tell you more about the opportunities that we see to help with decarbonization. I wanted to call out the recognition we've received from Great Place to Work and thank all our people for their continued engagement and commitment. First, let me hand you over to David to review the group's financial performance and our prospects. Thanks, Richard, and good morning, everyone. Looking at our group financial performance summary, we saw very good revenue growth in the first six months of the year, up 14% in sterling terms, and this translates into adjusted operating profit growth of 24%. The markedly stronger position of sterling relative to other currencies, notably the dollar, is a key feature of this set of results. In constant currency terms, revenue growth was 20%, of which 8 percentage points were organic, while adjusted operating profit growth was 33%. Adjusted EBITDA growth at 6% is lower than the growth rate of adjusted operating profit as we book amortization on a straight line basis, so the move away from eServe in the U.K. had a more pronounced effect on EBITDA in our seasonally quieter first half. For reference, if we stripped out COVID-related effects such as the reduction in marketing spend and Checkatrade discounts, as well as the impact of FX and the eServe amortization, adjusted operating profit growth would have been in the region of 11%. Given the very good first half performance and continued confidence in the group's growth prospects, we've declared an interim dividend of GBP 0.068 per share, and that's up 10% on the prior half year. Looking out over the rest of the year, with the position of sterling as at today, any further FX impact during the second half is expected to be immaterial when compared to the same period last year. Let's now take a look at the financial performance in our three divisions. In North American membership in HVAC, our outstanding performance, particularly at constant currency, continued to demonstrate the strong execution of our proven strategy with revenue up significantly and double-digit growth in adjusted operating profit. In EMEA membership in HVAC, there was good top-line growth of 8% in constant currency and good growth in adjusted operating profit, mainly driven by home emergency assistance in Spain. Drilling down slightly, performance in the U.K. was in line with our expectations back in May, with lower revenue driven by lower customer numbers in the membership business, offset by the removal of around GBP 4.5 million of eServe amortization, as well as operational cost savings, since the operating profit was broadly flat half on half. In Home Experts, one of the highlights of the half was seeing the division move into profitability. The key driver of this change was a sharp rise in Checkatrade revenue. Around 2/3 of which was driven by trades being back at full pricing, with the balance being due to the good work in delivering additional value to existing trades for which they are paying more, and the benefit of the additional trades signed in the second half of last year. Looking at group organic growth, revenue growth, this increased from 0.6% - 8.1%, with the basis of the calculation now only including those businesses owned throughout the whole of the comparative period. Looking at the divisional breakdown, in North America, we saw strong double-digit organic growth, while in EMEA, the U.K. and France are on an improving trend, and the Spanish business has a tough comparative, where you'll recall we saw a number of new insurer relationships commence last half year. Meanwhile, in Home Experts, the revenue bounce back at Checkatrade and the continued growth at eLocal have driven a strong recovery in organic growth. Turning now to look at cash flow and leverage. Operating cash flows of around GBP 97 million points to continuing cash-generative nature of the business model. First-half CapEx of around GBP 37 million was broadly in line with the prior first-half, while M&A spend of around GBP 51 million was mainly driven by the HVAC buy and build strategy, as well as increasing the group stake in eLocal from 79% - 90%. With the impact of tax, interest, dividend payments and foreign exchange movements, net debt stood at 2.1 x EBITDA at the seasonally high half-year. The acquisition of CET occurred after the half-year, and so the impact of this is not included in these numbers. However, we continue to target leverage in the range 1x-2 x at each full year. I'll conclude by summarizing our full year guidance. Everything we've seen in the first half just serves to strengthen our conviction that we will see an acceleration in performance for this full year, such that the group returns to its pre-pandemic trajectory of strong growth. First half, second half seasonality of adjusted operating profit continues to follow the significant skew seen historically. Over to Tom to take you through our North American business. Thanks, David, and good morning, everyone. The first half in North America was about outstanding execution against our proven model. What we focused on most is policy growth and customer satisfaction. Policy growth, whether it be from existing or new partners and customers, drives revenue and profit growth. Customer satisfaction drives retention, which is another key component of our model. It is great to see strong organic policy growth in the first half with policies up 12% to 8.5 million. Despite high claims volumes, customer satisfaction stayed strong at 4.8 out of 5 stars, which contributed to a 3 percentage point improvement in retention to 86%. The first two inputs to our Milestone 2 target are growth in customers and growth in net income per customer. The 8% growth in customers in the first half to 4.8 million was just about all organic and came from continuing our tried and true marketing with our existing partners. We saw 4% growth in policies per customer from 1.7 - 1.8, and this in turn drove a 7% increase in net income per customer to $111. In addition, we delivered on the strong pipeline of new partnerships, which I told you about in May, which means that we have 6.1 million new households to market to, which is just slightly less than we added in the whole of last year. We are seeing a return to normalcy around the sales process with some in-person conferences reappearing as well as in-person prospecting meetings happening again. Our pipeline remains strong, and while you never know with utilities, there is the potential for this year to be very strong with respect to the number of new households added. There are still policy book acquisition opportunities out there as well. You can never forecast policy book acquisitions, but there is a focused team on this. If and when we get them done, they will be accelerators to our plan. Utility prospects are responding well to our new products, electric vehicle charging, solar maintenance, and energy efficiency, and especially HVAC as a Service. These products deliver strengthened customer relationships and help utilities deliver against their ESG goals. The picture on the slide is of a public co-branded electric vehicle charging point we installed a couple of weeks ago in Texarkana, which is a city right on the Texas-Arkansas border. This charger was installed in partnership with Southwestern Electric Power and is part of the launch of our electric vehicle program together. I want to delve a bit deeper into HVAC, which has continued to deliver outstanding performance. Firstly, our buy and build strategy is working well, the build element as well as the buying. Operating profit in the period grew 86% to $13 million, again, more than we delivered the whole of last year. You've heard me say many times before that everything we work on in membership in HVAC should contribute to the same overarching goals, and that is to sell and service more policies and improve income per customer. HVAC is becoming an increasingly important channel for policy growth. We added 13,000 policies through our locally branded HVAC companies in the period, which is a 29% growth in policies through that channel. HVAC also complements membership because HVAC technicians employed by our locally branded companies are doing jobs for our members. 8,500 of them in the period, up 28%. Every job we do with our technicians improves our net income per customer. We are also gaining operational efficiency in HVAC by rolling out the ServiceTitan CRM system to help our acquired companies operate more efficiently. ServiceTitan is now used in eight out of 12 companies, and all of them will be on the platform by the end of this fiscal. Lastly, bear in mind that every installation and repair we make creates both energy efficiency and carbon savings. This is something that I'm really excited about. Most consumers want to be energy efficient, and virtually every utility in North America has a public goal for making their consumers more energy efficient or lower carbon producers or both. Additionally, almost every state utility regulator has required energy efficiency goals for the utilities that they regulate. As a result, U.S. utilities are spending over $9 billion a year on energy efficiency, and we are uniquely positioned to drive a significant amount of these efficiency upgrades for consumers and utilities due to our ability to do HVAC installs. HVAC accounts for around 40% of a home's energy use. However, the higher the efficiency, the more expensive the install. What if consumers could lease their HVAC equipment? We are about to test a new proposition in New York called HVAC as a Service. For a monthly fee, consumers will get a brand new high efficient HVAC system, all their maintenance, filters, tune-ups, and any service required. The customer saves money on energy and gets complete peace of mind on their HVAC. The utility delivers against their regulated goals. HomeServe gets both an install as well as a new policy with financing arranged via a third party, and the earth gets significant carbon savings. We've been sharing this proposal with prospective utilities, and all have been very interested. I hope this gives you a sense of the positive contribution HVAC is making to our progress in North America. To conclude, I'll just give you my perspective on where we are on our journey to Milestone 2. We've delivered revenue growth in the period of 35% to $354.2 million, an adjusted operating profit growth of 11% to $45.1 million. Remember, in the comparable period last year, it benefited from a reduction of $7 million in our marketing spend and other reductions in business as usual expenses like travel. There is definitely scope to keep improving our operating margin through operating efficiency as well as economies of scale. We're continuing to expand our use of technology, which means that we can deploy our people to handle more challenging customer situations and improve our customer service and our margins as we grow. Our new call center enterprise platform has launched, and we've now routed almost 2 million calls through Google's natural language processing, and our Salesforce product spine is live for all of membership. We are on a journey to fully digitize the member experience. In North America, the flywheel is certainly turning, and we've got plenty of scope to accelerate it further. Bringing all of this together, we expect to continue to deliver high teens growth in adjusted operating profit for the next few years, which means that we are doing better than our original plan to achieve our Milestone 2 operating profit target of $230 million, which I think puts us ahead of some of your expectations too. As I've said before, Milestone 2 is just that, a milestone with plenty more growth beyond. With that, I'll hand you over to Ross to talk about our progress in EMEA. Thanks, Tom. Let me start by summarizing our strategy at EMEA, and that is to grow a broad-based set of businesses with three complementary capabilities, membership, HVAC, and home emergency assistance. This is working really well for us in Spain, and so now we're building it out in the U.K. and with the acquisition of CET and also in France. We'll expand into near neighbor territories, for example, France into Belgium and Spain into Portugal, as well as looking at other opportunities where a strong partnership exists. For example, our joint venture with Mitsubishi Corporation in Japan. The right-hand side of this chart shows our flywheel, which has similarities to North America, but in EMEA demonstrates how the combined capabilities of membership, HVAC, and home emergency assistance will create broader businesses with distinct but related routes to profitable growth. These capabilities are supported by an efficient multi-skilled network of technicians that are capable of delivering our existing products to a high standard of service, as well as supporting new product development as our customer needs evolve, particularly in sustainable energy and electric vehicle charging. I'll tell you a bit more about each of our businesses in turn, starting with the U.K. HomeServe in the U.K. is a good business built on stable, long-term membership partnerships, mainly in the water vertical. The U.K. delivers excellent customer service, is well-positioned in the market, and is highly cash generative. Our plan is to build on this strong foundation to broaden the business, developing distinct but complementary capabilities in HVAC and home emergency assistance, which will deliver new routes to profitable growth. In the first half, the business performed as we expected it to in May. From a customer perspective, the half has been characterized by higher claims frequencies as our customers have used their homes more. Claims rates are still running above the levels we saw pre-pandemic, which we know drives increased customer satisfaction and which could, over time, drive a lasting improvement in the retention rate. Overall customer numbers are at 1.54 million and starting to show a slight reduction in the rate of decline. As you know, our U.K. business is underpinned by strong water partnerships which are in great shape. We've renewed eight contracts with water utilities covering nearly 7 million households this calendar year for an average contract length of five years. The other area I wanted to give you an update on is IT, where we have several projects underway to improve service and efficiency, notably field service delivery. Specifically on the decommissioning of the eServe project, this is progressing according to our plan, and all new customers are now being enrolled on Ensure, and we're on track to complete the migration by the end of this financial year. I'm confident that we now have the right team in place in the U.K. to manage our IT transformation projects well. Given you a bit of a flavor for the business as usual in the U.K., let's take a look at our transformation initiatives. In membership, it will come as no surprise to you to hear that our relationships with Shell Energy and E.ON haven't developed as fast as we originally hoped. That said, the opportunity is now bigger in energy, and that's primarily because Shell and E.ON have already taken on around 800,000 new households as less well-funded competitors have gone out of business. These partnerships remain strong. We have kept working on them to be ready to go live across all channels as the energy market settles later next year. We've also made good progress with several big water partners in digitizing the customer experience. Nothing we're doing here is rocket science, but as I'm sure you know, small changes in digital make a big difference. For example, we've seen an uplift in conversion by directing traffic straight to our core product pages, which are now mobile-optimized rather than to a comparison page. Moving on to HVAC, following a broad range of operational improvements, the existing installations business will make a positive EBIT contribution for the full year. Our first acquired locally branded HVAC business in the U.K. is performing well. We made our second acquisition towards the end of the period, and we have good pipeline of future targets. It's good to see that the buy and build strategy, which is already contributing well in France, Spain, and North America, is now making progress in the U.K. The last part of the strategy is home emergency assistance, where we completed the acquisition of CET on the 22nd of October. HomeServe already serves around 300,000 homes in this market through our relationship with Aviva, and we now have a leadership position. CET serves 3 million policies through nearly 40 partners and has some great digital technology in a proprietary platform called Simplify. This gives us a good platform for future product development in home emergency assistance, and we may also be able to use the platform internationally. The CET team will report directly into John Kitzie, our U.K. CEO, and will focus initially on continuing their strong track record of double-digit revenue and profit growth. Over time, there'll be opportunities to share technology and service expertise. I hope that gives you a picture of the initiatives we have underway in the U.K. to return the business to sustainable profit growth. Regarding U.K. customer numbers, we expect the year to end broadly at 1.5 million, and where this number settles over the next couple of years will depend on three things, the retention rate, where we're seeing good early progress, renewing and digitizing our water partners, where we're also making strong progress, and new sources of customer growth, like the energy channel. We'll keep you updated on how these three things progress, but our key focus is to build all three routes within the U.K. business to return the business to overall profit growth. As you can see from this slide, we expect our sources of profit to broaden considerably in the next three years. Moving on to France, the French business is continuing to see good top-line growth, with revenue up 28% to EUR 66.4 million, driven by 6% growth in customer numbers to 1.2 million, with very strong retention at 88%. We're seeing good progress with traditional partners, VEOLIA and SUEZ, but also with online aggregators, Papernest and JeChange. We're focused particularly on developing digital customer channels in France. Adjusted operating profit is down slightly to EUR 8.2 million due to the increased investment in growth. France is making great progress in HVAC, with double-digit organic revenue growth from the businesses that were with us through the PI period and good contributions from the 10 acquisitions we made in FY 2021. For the full year, we expect over half of our HVAC installations to be in green energy sources, heat pumps and pellet stoves, which is an interesting reflection on how well advanced the green energy transition is in France. We have made a small strategic investment in Repartim, which gives us an entry into home emergency assistance, and we're pleased with the progress we're making in Belgium. Marketing is now underway with Eneco and we signed a second partner, online aggregator CallMePower. One of the things I like best of our French business is that they are very good at systems integrations. They've been running two successful Salesforce projects in the period to streamline membership CRM and to add value to acquired HVAC companies. The secret of their success has been to adopt new systems rather than try and adapt them, and we have the right team structure and the right empowerment to deliver these projects well. Overall in France, good progress in membership, HVAC and home emergency assistance, steps forward in Belgium, and some great learnings on systems to take elsewhere in the group. Just turning to Spain, here too we're seeing good progress with all three core capabilities. Three-quarters of our Spanish revenue already comes outside of membership, and adjusted operating profit more than doubled in the period thanks to the growth in HVAC maintenance policies and the post-COVID recovery in home emergency assistance, which includes working with some new partners. Our partnership pipeline in Spain is now much stronger thanks to an innovative new proposition to provide partners with a full outsourced home assistance solution, covering product and program planning, campaign execution, claims management and customer service. We have a test agreement in place with the Portuguese retail energy supplier Aldro and a good list of other prospects. We're pleased with our expansion into Portugal, and that business is also expected to make a profitable contribution for the full year. Lastly, let me tell you about the encouraging progress in Japan. We can confirm today that we've started marketing to our third Japanese utility partner, Kyushu Electric Power, and we now have access to 12 million Japanese households, almost a quarter of the total. We also have a strong pipeline of developing utility relationships, and we expect to make strong progress growing our addressable market in the second half of the year. Our customer count is growing steadily and retention rates are looking very strong, among the highest we achieve anywhere in the group. Let me finish by sharing my perspective on HVAC. The development of our global HVAC strategy is part of my remit, and I think HVAC is a really exciting opportunity for HomeServe. It starts with a genuine repeat customer need. Every home in the developed world should have its boiler or air conditioning serviced once a year, and the market is changing. The green energy revolution is happening. In our current markets, there will be 4.5 million heat pump installations in the next 10 years. As Tom has already mentioned, as part of this change, there is a massive opportunity to introduce Heat as a Service, heating and cooling solutions in the form of a repeat monthly subscription. As you know, we're implementing buy and build strategy in HVAC for all of our established markets. We're following strict investment criteria, which you can see on the slide. We have a clear view of how to develop the businesses we buy, with the biggest opportunity being in operational optimization, followed by membership synergies and marketing benefits. As we've talked through each of our geographies, you'll have got a sense of the value we're already creating through HVAC, a high-quality complementary business line in an evolving market. As at the end of last financial year, we bought 46 businesses at a cost of GBP 145 million, and these delivered revenue of around GBP 150 million in FY 2021. Based upon achieving the returns we are targeting, we will grow a very valuable business which complements the rest of the group and is strongly positioned to make the green energy transition happen. With that, let me hand you over to Richard. Thanks, Ross. I share your enthusiasm for HVAC. In Home Experts, it's great to have reached the milestone of our first reported adjusted operating profit. We're now more convinced than ever of the potential to create an online marketplace to match consumers and trades that works better than word of mouth. Let's look at each of our Home Experts businesses in turn. In eLocal in North America, continues to deliver good revenue and profit growth. Our main learning from eLocal is a sophisticated pay-for-performance model, which is proving very successful with larger businesses. Over 50% of eLocal's revenue in the first half came from national accounts, and these accounts grew 24% in the period. Our focus at eLocal is to continue to invest in the national account sales team, but also scale up with small and medium-sized businesses to build our geographic coverage and improve monetization. At Habitissimo, we've reached and achieved much better focus in the business, which has resulted in a 27% reduction in operating losses. We're focused on the core markets of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In Spain, we've transitioned to the Directory Extra model and seen a sharp increase in consumer Net Promoter Score. We've started to sign key accounts, and we're looking to replicate the success we're seeing with larger businesses in eLocal. At Checkatrade, the big revenue increase came from three things. Firstly, the removal of the discounts offered to trades at the start of COVID. The 4,000 extra trades we recruited in half two last year. Thirdly, the sale of more postcode areas, job categories, and space in hard copy directories to existing trades, which together accounted for a 1/3 of the growth in the average revenue per trade. The abundance of work out there with all trades booked up meant that we didn't increase the number of paying trades in the first half, although renewals of existing members is holding strong, and we have seen a pickup in trade recruitment as we entered the second half of the year. Our biggest achievement so far at Checkatrade is attracting consumers to the platform, which is essential to making it more valuable for trades. Prompted brand awareness of Checkatrade reached an all-time high of 84% in August. Checkatrade's share of consumers who've used a tradesperson in the last 12 months continued to grow and is now at 20%. Our Julius Caesar TV advertising continues to perform well with the latest installment promoting GBP 1,000 free 12-month guarantee, which tested well in the Midlands, and we've now rolled out nationwide. That guarantee is conditional on consumers contacting trades via Checkatrade and leaving a review, so it builds consumer loyalty. Even before the ad began to air, we were seeing continued strong growth in contacts between consumers and trades. They grew 52% to 5.5 million in half one, generated from 18.2 million web visits, which themselves were up 37%. Another way that we're developing the consumer user experience is via the launch of a consumer portal, and that will engage with consumers more actively. Early tests of auto registration after users submit a review have proved positive, and we're on track to register almost 60,000 users a month. The part of building Checkatrade where we still have significant opportunity is in maximizing the value that we deliver to trades to drive growth in the number of trades on Checkatrade and average revenue per trade. Today, I just want to focus on three initiatives, starting with national accounts. This is drawing on our experience at eLocal, targeting larger regional and national businesses who are prepared to pay per job contact. As long as they pass our vetting and checking, we know that we can generate more contacts from these big accounts from customers with much higher intent than they get via their own Google advertising. We built our sales capability in this area and now have 100 national accounts signed up, and the scope to double that number. National accounts were only a small percentage of Checkatrade's revenue stream in the first half, but they'll make a bigger contribution in the second half and will become a key revenue stream. Secondly, Lite, Standard, and Pro packages. These packages fit a range of needs, from trades who just want enough work to supplement their order books, to those who are prepared to pay more for greater visibility on the platform. You can see the current distribution of revenue per trade on the chart. Over time, by targeting national accounts and the trades who want more work, we plan to move the distribution substantially to the right. Thirdly, postcode optimization. We can now produce sophisticated analytics so that trades can see consumer activity in their local area to help them make informed choices about which postcodes they want to access. This gives us a valuable opportunity to cross-sell more postcodes and, with a few clicks, deliver more value to trades. Initiatives like these give us a range of opportunities to grow the number of trades on Checkatrade and average revenue per trade. It's a mix of these two sources of growth that will get us to our Milestone 1 profit target of between GBP 45 million and GBP 90 million of annual profit. You'll remember from our Capital Markets Day back in 2019 that even Tom admitted that the marketing payback we achieve at Checkatrade is the best in the group at 9-18 months, compared to 18-36 months for membership. With Checkatrade's marketing costs stable and success in growing average revenue per trade, the unit economics of the business remain compelling. In conclusion, this has been a very good six months for HomeServe, both financially and strategically. COVID has confirmed the resilience of our business models. The headwinds facing the global economy, the threat of inflation, labor shortages, and supply chain disruption have all had negligible effect. We're moving forward on our three areas of strategic focus, driving growth in North America, transforming and broadening our business in the U.K., and developing a market-leading Home Experts platform. We're seeing some really interesting innovation in our continental European businesses. Back in May 2021, our guidance was that we expected to deliver an acceleration in performance this financial year, both strategically and financially. Our expectations for this year remain exactly the same as they were in May, with the only exception being GBP 1 million adjusted PBT uplift in the U.K., thanks to the acquisition of CET. Looking further forward, we can see a clear path towards delivering our milestone targets in North America and in Checkatrade. We're particularly pleased, as Tom said, that North America is doing better than our original plan with further growth to come even beyond that Milestone 2. On that note, thanks, everyone, and we're happy to take your questions. If you've joined the meeting remotely, please either register to ask a question by pressing star one on your telephone keypad, or type your questions into the web browser and we'll do our best to answer them. Three questions, if I may. First, probably for Tom on the Milestone 2 targets. You're clearly ahead of plan. Do you think the way you'll get there will be different from the way you originally intended? Second, maybe for Ross on the HVAC business. You mentioned other types of boilers, like ground source heat pumps, and I think air source as well. Could you tell us how the mix change will evolve over time and what your involvement will be in those new technologies in boilers? Third, maybe for Richard, if we could ask about trade growth at Checkatrade. Clearly that seems to be de-emphasized a bit. Can you tell us on the ground what's happening and what has happened and what you expect to happen on trades? Sure. Joe, to your first question, I think we'll pretty much get there about the round in the way we showed you back in our capital markets day in 2019, which is a combination of continued growth in the membership policies as well as the addition of HVAC profits to the $230 million target. I don't think the makeup's gonna be very different. I would say that we focus most on growing policies in the business 'cause policies are the proxy for revenue and profit growth, so we might see maybe more policies along the way, but I think the makeup will be relatively the same. Sure. Just on HVAC. I think France is probably the best example of what we expect to happen in our markets. In France, in the market, around 30% of all new installations are what we call green energy systems, so either air-air or air ground heat source pumps. In our HVAC businesses operating in France, we actually over-index that, so nearly half of our installations are in the new technologies. What's happened in France is a combination of customer demand and regulation that's driven that shift, and we expect that to follow through in each of our markets. The opportunity for us is that those installations are higher ticket and lend themselves really well to this subscription type model that we described as Heat as a Service. We see the opportunity to firstly have the operating ability to capture those installs and secondly, put a repeat revenue Heat as a Service proposition on top to help the consumer afford the switch. Can I ask on one of those new technologies, do you have, is it more of a level playing field? I imagine on things like gas in the U.K., you know, Centrica is an established player, but in new technologies, presumably you have, you know, sort of more level playing field. Is that right? Yeah, I think having the businesses with the right skills and the right reputation to manage the installation is the key. Our strategy is to buy local rounded companies with a strong reputation and the right skills. On trade growth in Checkatrade, we didn't see any growth in paying trades in the first half. That was driven by the headwind of all trades out there busy. The good news is that we are seeing availability of trade starting to come through post-COVID. We have signed 1,000 net extra trades in the last six weeks, so that bodes well, combined with seeing that we will get to the milestone target with a different mix, with a higher average revenue per trade and a lower number of paying trades required. Good morning. This is morning. This is David Brockton from Numis. Just one question actually just linked to the point you touched on in the outlook statement about the fact that labor availability issues, challenges, and cost inflation had negligible impact on the business. It seems to have impacted some of your competitors more through the period. A lot of them have talked about the challenges that has had. I just wondered if you could just touch on why you think that hasn't impacted your business, and can you maybe just talk about the dynamic between pricing, policy pricing, and how that's impacted and offset some of the cost inflation you've seen? Yeah. We have seen less of it, David. I think that if you look at work done in our membership businesses, for example, by contractors, which is a significant proportion across the piece, then we've got contractors signed up to fixed rates. We're increasingly giving them more work, so haven't seen that exposure come through. Little bit of pressure in our own directly employed, but ultimately, if we did see that starting to hit the bottom line, then we do have that pricing power in membership to be able to pass on those inflationary pressures through our membership pricing. Miriam. Please can we hand over to the operator now and take the calls that have come in on the conference call? Thank you, operator. Thank you. Certainly. As a brief reminder, that is star one for your questions today. We take our first question from Will Kirkness of Jefferies. Please go ahead. Morning. Thanks very much for taking my questions. I've got three, please. Firstly on Home Experts, I'm just intrigued a bit about the comment that you're sort of more convinced than ever here. I mean, the Checkatrade growth is, you know, looks pretty challenged, and if you look at how the customer recently trades back 40%, the sort of revenue's flat. It kind of feels like the strategy here is to swing price more than volume. The second question around the U.S. on the volume theme, numbers are rounded, so it's pretty hard to be exact, but if you look at gross additions rather than net additions, gross additions were up 700,000-ish in the first half, but 850,000 in the first half last year, and 900,000 in the first half last year. It looks like a lower gross addition number. I just want to check my math. Finally on the U.K., I could well have sort of missed the strategy here previously, but I wasn't really aware there were three pillars. I always thought it was one and then the second one was the HVAC. The third pillar appears to have come about with CET. Just going back in time, in 2004, you acquired a business which you then renamed Home Circle. I think it was first prepared in 2005. I think that was the most difficult improvement line. In 2009, you actually wrote off some of these assets and sold them, this insurance sort of servicing property repairs business. I just wondered if you could talk about how CET is different to the previous strategy? Thanks. Yes. On the first one of Home Experts then, we are happy with the way the other business is progressing so strongly into profit. Within Habitissimo specifically, that business is in a transition period of putting in the Directory Extra model. We're not pushing it too hard until we've proved out the final elements of the Checkatrade model. We're happy that we're making the right progress. Let me jump on and just answer the U.K. one going back to 2003, 2004, and then let Tom handle the U.S. one. Back then, we bought businesses that were doing repair jobs for home insurers on things like fire and flood restoration. CET is a very different business because it is focused on our core capability, which is home emergency assistance. We're very clear that having those two businesses together will give us scale economies. Great that in the U.K. that we're now servicing nearly 5 million homes with home assistance cover. On gross additions in the half. Gross additions in the half were obviously up over the half last year because of the increased marketing spend in the first half. There's a little bit of timing with respect to gross additions, and I would also tell you that our post office is struggling a little bit to keep up with the volume in North America. If I step back and just look at what I expect for the full year, I expect to deliver solid customer growth this full year. Thanks. Operator, can we take our next call from the conference call line, please? Yes, certainly. We move on to Andy Grobler from Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, everybody. Three from me as well, if I may. Firstly, just picking up on the previous question with CET. Richard, you talked about having 5 million or so consumers in the U.K. Could you talk us through any cross-selling opportunities that really exist between your membership business and CET? Are there going to be kind of revenue or other synergies that you can pursue? Secondly, again, picking up on a previous question on wage inflation. You mentioned that contractors are on fixed rates and you hadn't seen notable pressure as yet. Do you think that is likely to come next year with the amount of demand there are for trades out there? If you don't raise wages, aren't you going to see more of those staff begin to leave? Thirdly, just in North American business, the underlying margins in membership fell quite sharply from the first half of last fiscal year. Could you just talk us through why that's the case? Thank you very much. Yeah. I will take the first two of those and then let David handle the third one on margins in membership. CET, this is about getting increased capability and volumes in our core home emergency assistance. We don't have cross-sell rights to those customers 'cause they're not owned in the way that our 1.54 million utility customers are in the U.K. The real synergies will come through cost efficiencies as we bring the businesses together. Wage inflation, I think, we need to wait and see. I think some of that inflationary pressure may come off next year. If it doesn't, we will have to pay a bit more to our contractors and to our own engineers, and we will take that into account in our policy pricing. In terms of the margin, in the U.S. last year, you may recall we paused marketing April, May, during the early parts of the pandemic. We took out about $7 million of marketing spend in the first half last year. That kind of made the first half slightly higher in terms of profits and profit margin. Obviously this year we've put all the marketing back in. It's been a full normal period of marketing, so the margins are much more sort of normalized in this first half. We've got quite a lot of questions coming in via the webcast, and there are a couple on here which continue on the CET theme. These are from Ricardo Alba Santos at Calibrium, and he asks, "From a customer perspective, what are the differences between a home emergency insurance policy sold by an insurer and served by CET and the membership product marketed by HomeServe? These seem to be competing products from a customer perspective. I'll take that one. Yeah. I think the first thing to mention is that CET presents itself in terms of the add-on policies that are presented mainly digitally to customers who buy their home insurance policy. We tend to be serving a younger customer. In terms of the policy itself, it's thinner cover than our core membership product with a higher excess and lower claims frequencies. These policies tend to be bought by a younger, more digital customer that values the protection it gives, but is not the same customer as that would buy a full membership product where we have a much higher and broader level of cover and a higher, therefore protection for the home. Actually, we don't see a huge overlap between the two customer groups. We see that CET gives us access to a large number of households that are buying this type of protection, via a digital channel as part of their home insurance renewal. We see it as additive. There's another one on CET, this is also from Ricardo, which is what has been driving CET double-digit growth and what has been the growth of the underlying market? I think this is a market that is grown steadily over the last few years as people have increasingly turned to digital channels to repurchase insurance, and therefore this has been presented by insurers as part of that journey. CET has grown its share consistently within that market, and I think that's down to two core reasons. One is they've got a great reputation for delivering strong customer service to their clients and to their end customer, and they've done that successfully for a number of years. The second is that the technology that they've developed allows them to deliver that great customer service and allows them to integrate into their client's systems to present a really seamless journey for the customer. I think those two things combined have enabled them to win against competitors, grow share, and maintain that share over time, and we expect that there's plenty more share growth to go. Just one more from Ricardo, which is on the membership business in the U.K., which is just asking for a reminder, why did the number of affinity partner households decrease by 3 million? I think, because of Thames Water renewal. That was, a little while ago now, prior to our last full year results. I think we talked about that at our full year results. I think you could just say a little bit more to remind us about Thames. Thames was a renewal where we did tender in the same way we do for all tenders. When we looked at it in the round, the terms that were being requested made it not an attractive partnership for us, and so we didn't renew it. But we have been very successful since then in renewing our other core water partnerships. I think we talked about that in the presentation. Thank you. There's a series of questions from Anvesh Agrawal at Morgan Stanley. I'll ask these one at a time. First one's about the U.S. We've got 86% increase in the U.S. HVAC operating profit, and that would imply that core membership profits declined year-over-year. Can you let us know the reason for that, please? Yeah. It's actually the marketing that David talked about. If you put the, sort of normalize the marketing expense on a half over half, then you would see growth in the membership business. Thank you. On the U.K. business, why is the U.K. income per customer declining? We talked about the claims frequencies in the U.K., which pre-pandemic, you know, have grown and sustained highs through the pandemic and since, although we are starting to see them come back down to more pre-pandemic levels now. Just as a reminder, in the U.K., we have pretty rich cover, and we have a risk-sharing agreement with our underwriting partner, which allows us to achieve really strong commercial terms. I think the net income per customer just reflects the increased claims frequency trend that we've seen through the pandemic, but that we're also seeing come through in great customer satisfaction and early signs of a better retention rate. A couple on Checkatrade which relate to Checkatrade. First of all, the guarantee. Who will pay for the Checkatrade GBP 1,000 guarantee in case customers claim? Is it HomeServe or the trades? Also, do you need to do some provisioning for this? Yeah. The reason why we tested the guarantee was to find out what it was going to cost to make that 12-month GBP 1,000 free guarantee offer and found that the cost is negligible. Very few claims against it because generally offering very good service through our checked and vetted Checkatrade trades, so able to roll it out. The cost will be very, very small. Net-net, we get more consumer visits coming back to Checkatrade as a result of offering it, so it more than pays out. It's Checkatrade covering the cost of it, not the trades. I do see it as an extra reason why Checkatrade would want to be on Checkatrade, so they can say they're not only approved, but now they are guaranteed. In response to the direct question, yes, we will be. Even though it's a negligible expense and exposure, we will be providing for the expected claims that we would expect to see on an incurred but not reported basis, but we would have a provision against those claims. Richard, with the U.K. remaining a skill-short market and therefore tradesmen likely to be in demand, how should we think about the long-term trades target given this dynamic? Yeah, I think as we talked earlier, we will get to our Milestone 1 through a different mix, increased revenue as we give more value to trades and a lower number of paying trades. Interestingly, I looked at who is our top paying trade in our national accounts, and without telling you who it is, they're paying us GBP 95,000 a year for being on the platform. That's how we'll get there. In terms of the specific skill shortage, I do think this is a really attractive sector. We will see people reskilling from retail, coming out of the army. There are organizations out there in the U.K. that retrain people to NVQ Level 2 within 12 months. We've started getting our field sales reps in Checkatrade into their training centers because half of those people go on to become a self-employed plumber or heating engineer or carpenter. I think that will be a key way that we address the skill shortage in the U.K. Morning, guys. Calum Battersby from Berenberg. Three questions, please. Firstly, you called out the impact of lower marketing spend in the prior year comparative for the U.S. Presumably, that's the case across the other markets. Can you say approximately what that impact is for the entire group? And then secondly, given the change in ownership of some of your competitors in the North American membership business, do you expect an increase in the level of competition for policy book acquisitions and new partnership tenders? And then lastly, just wondering if you could give any more color on the progress of rolling out some of those new products that you mentioned around things like EV charging points and energy efficiency. Is there any timeline or expectations of the revenues that you think those could generate over the next couple of years? Thank you. Yeah. I'll let David take the first one on marketing spend in other territories. Tom to talk about competition in the U.S. and those new product launches. Yes, in terms of the other territories, it was negligible. The U.S. is probably one of our markets, is the one market that markets continuously every single month at high volume. The rest of the countries, in terms of U.K., France and Spain, we didn't have significant marketing scheduled at all in the April-May period, so there was nothing really of any significance paused. With respect to the change of ownership on AWR, you know, we've always competed with them. They're probably our primary competitor in North America. We've always done very well competing against them. In particular, we tend to win around the quality of our products and the quality of our customer service and our marketing. You know, I expect them to continue to be a competitor in the marketplace. Look, we're both going after another 33 million customers, and it's a very big under-penetrated market with lots to go after for both of us. Even if we do have a solid competitor, there's plenty of room for growth for both of us. With respect to the progress on the new products, it's very early days with respect to marketing those products. We just launched the EV charging product with a couple utilities. We are about to launch Heat as a Service in New York with a very large utility there. Solar, we're still prospecting with. What I would say is the real power of those products is that they're opening doors to utilities that would have been more difficult to get in. We are having more prospect conversations with utilities as a result of bringing them products that enable their customers to be more energy efficient, that enable their customers to be more resilient, that enable their customers to be more efficient, be lower carbon producers than ever before. The pipeline is really, really strong. I suspect we'll launch with all those energy efficiency/resiliency products, and then, like we do in most cases, over time expand our partnership to include all our products. Early days on the marketing, but it's been very powerful with respect to the pipeline. Hey, thanks. Good morning. It's Harry Gowers from J.P. Morgan. Just a quick one on North America, if I can. What should we expect for partner households added in H2? Can we expect that to be, you know, similar to the 6 million added in H1 versus the last full year? Thank you very much. Harry, I wish I could forecast that. You know, we don't really forecast new households because there's, you know, there's a very large sales team talking to lots and lots of utilities. I think this will be a pretty solid year with respect to new partner household adds. That's really the best I can give you. The pipeline is stronger than ever before. There's more discussions I just talked about with EV and resiliency than ever before. It's always hard to predict when you're gonna sign them, but really positive pipeline is the best I can give you. Miriam? These are three questions from Andrew Nussey at Peel Hunt. The first question, the water partner renewals in the U.K., could you confirm that the T's and C's are consistent with prior assumptions? Yeah. Ross? In terms of contract, yeah, we talked about the contract lengths are similar, so average of five years, and, all of the commercial terms are attractive. Yeah. The second question then, please could you expand on the operational cost savings in the U.K.? Are they one-off in nature or recurring? No. I mean, there are a number of strands to that. I think, you know, we talked about the systems transformation work that we're doing in service delivery. That's one of the bigger drivers of operational efficiency, and there's no one silver bullet there. We expect that to be a continuously improving picture over time, and a decent contributor towards the return to sustainable profit growth. Okay. A Checkatrade question. Has Checkatrade marketing spend been consistent period-on-period? Your thoughts on how this is going to develop? Yes, it has. Consistently spending, that's principally behind the TV advertising, little bit of SEM spend and then spend against trade acquisition. We'd expect that would go up a bit as revenue grows. Thank you. We're now going to move on. We've got a series of cash flow questions from Tineke at Waverton Capital. Cash tax seemed high in H1. Can you please outline the main drivers for the gap between P&L and cash tax? That's the first one. And what might this look like for the next 18 months? Yes. Cash tax is increasing. We're increasingly seeing more of our profits come from overseas, and in particular in the first half, a lot of sort of profit expectation coming from the North American market. It's really around the timing of payments on account for the year. We're expecting good solid growth across our markets and therefore more cash tax to be paid in our markets and which more of which are overseas. In terms of overall, obviously the cash tax and P&L charges do broadly line up over time, particularly when you include the deferred tax. What we will see is an effective tax rate slight increase over time as we see more and more of our profits coming from the overseas territories, all of which are higher tax rates than the U.K. The second question is what are the main drivers behind the typical working capital drawdown? The working capital, you know, it's principally around the working capital absorption, principally around the membership business. When we sell a policy, we effectively book the majority of the income up front. That effectively creates a big receivable. When we collect the cash over the period of time, that unwinds that receivable. At the same time as we set up the receivable, we set up a comparable payable for the underwriting and the partner commissions. Obviously, there's a fixed margin in there, and that creates the working capital drawdown. Which, given the business is growing, particularly North America, means we absorb each and every year the working capital. Okay. I've got. I'm going to try and combine two sets of questions, both of which are around underwriting. These are from Dan Cowan at HSBC and Andy Brooke at RBC. The release mentions the impact of higher underwriting costs on revenue in the U.K. due to higher call out frequency. Is there any quantification of this effect? You've also mentioned higher call outs in North America. Does that mean you're seeing higher underwriting costs in North America too? If you're seeing an increase in underwriting costs, what price rises are you looking at putting through on average? Yes, in terms of, as Ross referred to in the presentation, a significant element of the net income per customer reduction in the U.K. is down to the increased frequencies, where we are seeing a higher cost to serve those policies. It's not quite as marked in the U.K. in the U.S., and that's because of the mix of policies, where the U.S. has more line policies versus the plumbing and drains and tap policies here in the U.K. In terms of pricing, as a strategy, we would normally look to put forward inflationary price rises only, and that's a typical assumption across the board. Where we do see one-off step up in operating cost and service to. Cost to serve, then we will look at whether or not it's appropriate to put through a further price rise to take account of the fact that it is costing us more. As Ross also said, we are seeing benefits to the business from slightly higher retention rates and then delivering good service. We look at it in the round and make sure that we're always delivering great value to the consumer. It's not necessarily a straight pass-through if it's not necessary, given the overall margin and performance of the business. Can I just check if there are any more questions from anyone in the room? Okay. I've got one more then, coming through, on the webcast, which is, this is about the longer term opportunity, in North America. This is from Richard Leonard at Trium Capital. The longer term opportunity in North America and how it compares to what we see in the rest of the world. How are we measuring the longer term opportunity in North America, and how does it compare with what we've seen elsewhere? Well, I think like most things in North America, it's much bigger. Look, I think we have a very proven model. The team is really going from strength to strength with respect to partner signings. Response rates are up. We're adding new products. We're building a bigger pipeline. As we've said many times around Milestone 2, it is just that, a milestone. The opportunity for profit growth in North America is very significant and will continue for a long time, decades. The best number I can give on that one. That concludes the questions I've got online, Richard. Back to you to conclude. Great. Thanks for those questions. We had 29 questions, I think, in total. Well, that was great. Thanks for everybody that's attended in person this morning. Great to see you all back face to face, but also a big thank you for everybody that joined online. Thank you.