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ANNUAL REPORT 2012/13 TO NORTH EAST RESIDENTS Tony Grainger Regional Housing Director As a registered housing association, we are regulated by a government agency called the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), and there are a number of set standards we have to follow. These standards guarantee we are financially secure as a business, and we provide you with quality and value for money services. The HCA’s main concern is that we are a well run and financially secure business. It wants residents to decide whether their landlords give them a good service or not by checking how well we perform against the set ‘consumer standards’ listed below and challenging us where you think our service isn’t good enough. Our customer service committees also monitor how we perform against these standards. TENANT INVOLVEMENT AND EMPOWERMENT – your choices, how you get involved and influence our business and how we understand and respond to your needs. TENANCY – how we let our homes and help you to exchange your homes. HOME – the quality of our homes and how we repair and invest in them. NEIGHBOURHOOD & COMMUNITY – how we work in your neighbourhoods with our partners to provide you with new and improved services and tackle problems such as anti-social behaviour. You will notice that we have rated ourselves green in some areas of performance even though our scores are lower than they are in some areas where we have rated ourselves amber. This is because we met the targets we set ourselves in these areas. Where we have rated ourselves amber, despite a higher score, it is because we have either not reached our targets, or we are not in the top 25% of performing landlords in the country in these areas of service.
The HCA is happy that our current and long term financial plans are secure. The facts and figures included in our 2012/13 annual report show you how we have performed against these standards over the past year. We have used traffic lights because you have told us it is easy to see where we have done well and reached our targets (a green light), or where we have scored quite high, but not reached our targets (an amber light). We are reporting figures ‘regionally’ (Yorkshire and Humberside, the North East and the North West) and across the north (Accent Foundation as a whole). The figures are listed under our four main business objectives. Next year, as part of our new ‘personal, modern, better’ service, we will report all our performance regionally. For value for money, we’ve included this report as part of your magazine as it would cost more to produce it separately. Please tell us what you think of the report by completing our questionnaire at the end and returning it to us.
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In our last issue, we told you how we are changing the structure of our organisation and the way we do business to provide you with a new ‘personal, modern and better’ service from spring next year. Where we talk about how we will deliver your services in the future, it’s all part of this new service.
Deliver excellent, locally agreed services Delivering your services in 2012 We hold regular staff on site days so you can meet with us and raise any issues you have with your home or estate. We use your feedback to address local issues and improve our service. We support those of you affected by the government’s welfare reforms. Where possible, we have helped residents at risk from under-occupation (bedroom tax) move to smaller homes. We run regular advice and information features in our magazines. Our website has a useful information video. We use ‘customer profiling’ (collecting and recording information about you), to make sure we deliver services fairly and tailor them to meet your needs. We provide you with a range of information to support you in your tenancy, which can be produced in different languages, large print, on audio or in Braille on request. We worked closely with residents and contractors to produce our contractor’s code of conduct which takes your needs into account when we carry out repairs A group of residents have helped us to review and improve our complaints process.
87% of you are happy with our overall service.
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Delivering your new personal, modern, better service Residents will make up at least one third of our new customer service committees. Committee members will work with residents locally to closely scrutinise services and improve them. With our new resident engagement strategy, we will improve the quality and range of your involvement. We will improve how we talk to you, the choices we offer you, and give you more chances to monitor how we perform. In each region, staff will work to a local plan for engaging with you and addressing local issues. In the North East region, we only resolved 63% of complaints in our target timescales, which is disappointing. With our new complaints policy, we will resolve your complaints quicker and improve the service we give you. We will deal with stage one in 24 hours, stage two in five working days and stage three in 20 working days. We will be more accountable to you, make sure the right staff deal with your complaint and use your feedback to further improve the service.
We will improve our website with a range of new interactive features, including paying your rent and tracking your repairs. We will make more use of Twitter and Facebook to tell you about the things we are doing. We will continue to support you through the government’s welfare reforms, and look at how we can help those of you in arrears caused by bedroom tax.
76% of you were satisfied with the outcome of your complaint 76% of you were satisfied that we take your views into account 81% of you were happy that we kept you informed 68% of you were satisfied with how we handled your complaint
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Provide high quality homes to live in 78% of you are satisfied with the quality of your homes. 89% of you were satisfied with the improvement work in your home. 100% of you are satisfied with adaptations made to your home
Across Accent 119 new homes were completed and 264 new homes were started on site Delivering your services in 2012 We spent over £10 million on improving your homes through planned maintenance, servicing contracts, disabled adaptations and other work. At the end of the financial year (March 2013), 96% of our homes in the north met the government’s Decent Homes Standard. This has risen from 89% last year. Our target is 100%. 99% of our homes with a gas supply have a gas safety certificate. Our target is 100%. Your repair calls are handled by our dedicated team in our repairs service centre. We offer you appointments for all non-emergency repairs, with a choice of appointment slots. We aim to answer your calls in 24 seconds – 94% of them were. We use Call2Survey to check if your repairs have been completed and follow up any concerns. 83% of you were satisfied with the way your repair was dealt with.
Staff and residents meet regularly with our main contractors and gas contractors to monitor performance and address any issues. A group of residents has been involved in agreeing new repair and maintenance contracts for cyclical works. Delivering your new personal, modern, better service 84% of your repairs were completed ‘right first time’. This figure has dropped slightly since last year, which is a concern to us, so we have worked closely with our contractors to get back on track. It is now improving and we hope to reach our target of 90% in the 2013/14 financial year. We will use our new and improved repairs response times to complete all your repairs in 14 days. We will publish a five year planned maintenance programme every year so you can see what work is planned for your home and estates. We will continue to invest in and improve our homes so they reach the Accent Property Standard by 2015. We will use Call2Survey to check your satisfaction with other services in future to help us improve.
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Support our residents to sustain their homes and communities 98% of you were happy with our service when you first moved into your home 80% of you are happy with how we deal with cases of anti-social behaviour 80% of you are happy with the final outcome of an anti-social behaviour case 80% of you are happy with your neighbourhood as a place to live
Delivering your services in 2012 We carry out a support assessment on all our new residents before they are offered a tenancy to make sure we can give them the right support if they need it. Our starter tenancies include regular visits so we can see how well a new resident is managing their tenancy and sort out any problems quickly with support and guidance. We offer you free training to help you improve your skills and find work. We also work with our contractors and other agencies to arrange training and work placements. When we build or modernise homes, we have agreements with our contractors to create training schemes and work placements for our local residents and people living in the community. In Horden, our weekly jobs club offers professional help and support with job searching, e-learning, CV writing, application forms and getting ready for interviews.
We work closely with you to solve problems on your homes and estates, and work with other landlords where a problem affects us all. We are signed up to the national ‘Respect: Anti-social behaviour for Housing Charter’. We have a 90% satisfaction target for case handling of anti-social behaviour which, disappointingly, we have not reached this year. We have reviewed our process and, by better understanding what we can do that works well, we will improve it next year. Delivering your new personal, modern, better service Our new ‘tenancy sustainability officers’ will work with new and existing residents to help them manage their tenancies if they are at risk of failing. The support will include how to set up home, benefit and debt advice, digital and financial inclusion (help with finances and getting online), training and employment. This support will lower the number of residents who leave us because they cannot manage their tenancies. We will also develop new community partnerships to support you and help you manage your tenancy We will continue to work with government training and work agencies, and our contractors and community partners to offer you training and work placements to improve your skills and qualifications, or your chances of finding employment.
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Be an ambitious and successful business Delivering your services in 2012 In the North East, it takes an average of 45 days to re-let our homes (not sheltered schemes) when they become empty. We need to re-let them quickly as we lose rent when they are empty. We have agreed an improved target time of 10 days in which to complete longer term empty homes with our contractors. In the North East last year, our rent arrears were almost 6% of all the rent due to us. Our new tenancy sustainability team will work closely with residents whose tenancies are at risk of failing, for rent arrears or for other reasons, which will help to lower rent arrears. Adapting your homes In the North East, we carried out 90 minor home adaptations at a value of £16,055 and 38 major adaptations at a value of £120,228. We fund all minor adaptations up to the value of £1,000. Many housing organisations rely on Disabled Facilities Grant to make major adaptations, but we continue to invest in your homes by trying to fund at least some major adaptations from our own budgets. 100% of you were happy with the adaptations we made to your home. Repairs and maintenance It makes more sense to plan our repairs and improvements. In the north, we spend more on planned repairs (68% of our repairs and
maintenance bill), than we do on reactive repairs (32%). This is good (and better than many other associations) but it has gone down slightly since last year. Our target for next year is 70/30. Delivering your new personal, modern, better service We will continue to save on operating costs from the re-structure of our business and our new ‘personal, modern and better’ service. We are on track to save our target of £1.75 million. This saving is not being made from cutting any of your services, but from office and administration costs. We will continue to reinvest these savings into your homes, communities and services. We will aim to reduce the amount of time it takes to re-let our homes when they become empty to 20 days. (This doesn’t include our sheltered schemes or other supported homes).
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How every ÂŁ1 of your rent is spent across the north
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This surplus is needed to meet the requirements of our funders and to provide money to reinvest in your homes. We spent an extra ÂŁ18 million on major improvements to your homes. Your rent this year did not pay for this, the money came from cash generated in previous years.
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Annual Report 2012/13 Customer Feedback Please let us know what you think of our Annual Report by filling in this questionnaire. In return, we’ll enter your replies into a prize draw to win £50, £20 or £10 in high street vouchers. Thank you and good luck Name:
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