A local focus to address local challenges

We know that the basic building blocks of customer satisfaction are a secure, well-maintained home, backed up with a highly effective housing management and repairs service. Our strong partnerships with our local authority partners, statutory and voluntary agencies are vital to improving the lives of our customers and our communities.

The Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee published a report earlier this year, recognising the serious financial pressure put on our sector and that there is a drastic shortage of quality social housing. It also attributes some disrepair, in part, to the age and design of the housing stock, “some of which was never built to last and is now approaching obsolescence”.

Since growing as an organisation through our partnership nearly three years ago, we’re now carrying out a large-scale stock condition evaluation to inform our future planned investment programme. Despite being bigger in size, we’re reinforcing our large but local by addressing local challenges facing each of our neighbourhoods. By leveraging a ‘see something, say something’ approach empowering all of our customer-facing team to be ‘surveyors’ out in our communities, we’re working to identify block condition issues earlier. Culturally, this enables frontline colleagues to drive change on behalf of those who live in our communities. Last year, on top of our planned maintenance budget, we invested an additional £1.4million to improve the overall standard of our homes.

Maintaining quality homes and quickly identifying and addressing any issues causing disrepair, damp or mould is a top priority of ours. In today’s ‘cost of living crisis’ with prices of everyday goods and services rising faster than the average household income, we know it’s going to get even harder to heat homes given rising energy costs. In response to this we’re prioritising our heating upgrade programmes to improve the energy efficiency of our properties.

It’s crucial that we respond to what our customers are telling us in order to give them what they want and expect: a great service. Our customer-first approach establishes a powerful sense of local ownership and accountability for improving services to customers, homes, and neighbourhoods, we want our customers to feel empowered, heard, and directly involved in how we shape our services. To do this, we’re developing and demonstrating ‘locality focus’ and accountability, listening better, increasing choice, communicating improvement timescales, and setting shared priorities through joint estate inspections in our communities.

With our focus on core housing management and repairs services, and ‘listening’ to improve the condition of our homes and estates, I’m confident we’re taking steps to deliver our strategic mission of creating great, sustainable communities and empower lives by ensuring our homes are fit for today, and for the future.