Mark Davies
CEO & Director
Good morning. Thank you for joining us. We are here today at a very exciting time for our company on the day of publishing a very strong set of results. We recently completed a transformational merger with Assura plc, in a short space of time have made great progress delivering the strategic and financial benefits of this transaction.
Since our well-received trading update on the 13th of January, we’ve made further progress on our strategic priorities. I’ll bring you up to date on that today plus share with you our well progressed discussions with joint venture partners on our primary care and private hospital assets.
You will also see from our presentation later, there are a number of positive learnings from our enlarged portfolio review. And the further upside we can see will deliver value in the future.
This has been a transformational year, and this is a strong set of results. I’ve already alluded to the positive impact of the combination with Assura. And I’m delighted to say that despite doubling in size, we’ve retained a focus on delivering growing returns for shareholders on both an absolute and a per share basis.
We’ve delivered 4% growth in adjusted earnings per share and our dividend remains fully covered. This was achieved through over 3% growth in rental income, which was slightly ahead of the guidance we laid out at our Capital Markets Day in July. And we’ve maintained