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ANNUAL REPORT 2012/13 TO ACCENT PEERLESS RESIDENTS Robert Mills 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 that we have to follow. These standards guarantee that 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. 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). 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. 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 94% of your calls were answered in time, which is an improvement from last year. Although we improved steadily throughout the year, our performance still needs to improve. Our target for 2013/14 is 96.5%. Delivering your services in 2012 Our new IT system is designed to collect and store more information about you, which means we can give you a more efficient service when you contact us. We support those of you affected by the government’s welfare reforms. Where possible, we have helped residents at risk from underoccupation (bedroom tax) move to smaller homes. We run regular advice and information features in our agazines. 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. Following a review of our complaints process, which involved residents and staff, we improved our service. We are now carrying out a further
review to make sure the process is straightforward and we can respond to changes in legislation. We trained our scrutiny panel members how to inspect our services. A recent review of estate inspections recommended a need for better communication, which we are currently working on. From a survey in Housing Headlines offering training, residents took these courses: Training subject CV writing, job search and interview tips Equality & Diversity awareness Mystery shopping Tenant inspector training Introduction to IT Sheltered IT drop in Peerless Plus drop in sessions
Number of residents trained 4 14 2 4 12 59 33
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81% of you are happy with our overall service. This is the same as last year. We aim to improve it to 85% this year.
We started a service consultation at all our sheltered schemes. Over 60% of you took part, giving us your feedback on the proposed new service. The services that improved during the year as a direct result of your input were: 1. Estate Inspection process 2. A scheme window cleaning service 3. Use of gardens 4. Sheltered service 5. ASB Strategy 6. Customer charter 7. Complaints 8. Star rating on estate services. We use Facebook and Twitter to keep you informed of estate inspections and other activities. We also use our social networks to promote training and involvement. Delivering your new personal, modern, better service We resolved 35% of your complaints in our target timescales, and 55% of you were satisfied with how your complaint was handled. This is disappointing and of concern to us. Our new complaints policy, which our local scrutiny panel and staff have been involved in improving, will resolve your complaints quicker and improve your service. There will be a 24-hour informal early resolution, followed by an investigation stage within five working days and a review stage within 20 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 the way we deal with your enquiries by training our customer services team in tenancy issues and rent enquires. This will allow them to deal with 80% of your enquiries at the first point of contact. We will improve our website by making it easier to use and adding more interactive services, such as paying your rent and viewing your rent statements. We will also use YouTube to host videos and blogs on issues that affect you. We will publish our performance information within three days of the appropriate month ending on our website, social media sites and in reception. We will be more open by publishing information on our day-to-day business and how we spend some of our money. Our website will include, for example, board member and staff salaries, notes and agendas from our meetings, annual reports and business plans, and your handbooks and leaflets. We will involve you in our tender process for contracts, and in reviewing performance and making recommendations for service improvements. When we review our service areas, we will let you know the outcomes on our website and in our newsletters. We will let you know when our services change as a result of your suggestions or complaints in our newsletters, and on our website and social media sites. Our future residents’ training will include basic DIY and property inspection.
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Provide high quality homes to live in Across Accent 119 new homes were completed and 264 new homes were started on site Delivering your services in 2012 We completed phase one, (47 new homes for rent and shared ownership) of our new development at Franklands Drive, Addlestone. We re-let 186 homes during the year, in an average time of 23 days. • We supported 47 residents through mutual exchanges with other residents. • We granted 120 starter tenancies and promoted 31 starter tenancies to assured tenancies. • We transferred 22 residents affected by domestic violence, serious harassment or other exceptional circumstances where they were unable to remain in their homes. Our tenancy sustainment officers support new residents when they move into their home, and help existing residents in financial difficulty. They have also helped residents learn basic computing, CV writing and money management skills. Following the grant of a possession order for over £1000 of arrears, the tenancy sustainment team helped one resident keep their home. After a home visit and a review of the resident’s finances, an agreement to repay the arrears was made, on condition that the resident continued with the team’s support and would contact us immediately if payments become difficult. The arrears were cleared and the case was closed. As a result of completing a value for money review of our repairs contract with Lovell, we saved over £250k. We have reinvested most of this into new your kitchen and bathroom improvements. We are negotiating more value for money with Lovell with an extended contract to March 2015. The contract will be based on the best possible price per home, excellent quality and top performance.
100% of our homes met the government’s Decent Homes Standard. Our planned works programme was worth £3.2 million and included: • 125 Kitchen replacements • 103 Bathroom replacements • 39 Windows and Doors • 55 Heating Upgrades • 200 loft and cavity wall insulation upgrades • 84 Smoke Detectors • 251 CO2 detectors supplied and fitted We reached our target to service 99.6% of our homes with gas supplies. 12 homes had overdue services. Only two of these were overdue by more than a month. We carried out a detailed review of our fire risk assessments (FRAs), which resulted in a number of service improvements. 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 We will continue to develop the remaining 126 new homes on the Franklands estate. Our programme for 2013–14 has been extended to make sure we continue to achieve the Decent Homes Standard. Our budget has risen to £3.9m, but we have negotiated a 30% cost saving from our kitchen and bathroom contractors. This will allow us to fit a further 67 kitchens and 44 bathrooms. The programme will deliver:
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• • • • • •
290 kitchen replacements 145 bathroom replacements 277 windows and doors 364 heating upgrades 385 smoke detectors 344 CO2 detectors
Our repairs performance compares favourably with top scoring landlords, but your satisfaction with our service dropped to 85% this year. We are working closely with our contractors to improve this.
Support our residents to sustain their homes and communities Delivering your services in 2012 We developed a ‘star rating system’ for our estates. All our estates now have a rating and we will work with residents to improve those where ratings are lower. The estate management group and the scrutiny panel worked together to improve our estate inspection process and the way we talk to you about it. In response to your requests, we carry out evening estate inspections so more of you can attend. We carried out a number of resident involvement activities on our estates. These included a responsible dog ownership week with the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA). In partnership with the police, we carried out a teenagers’ football training course. We worked closely with the St Michael’s Group in Camberley and are currently looking to develop a multi-use games area for local children. You helped us monitor the standard of cleaning in our communal areas. On average, 35 of you respond to us each month, (a 77% satisfaction rate with the service). We had 123 responses from our grounds maintenance monitors and there is a 91% satisfaction rate with the service. We dealt with 86 anti-social behaviour cases. Of those of you who responded to our satisfaction survey, 89% of you were satisfied with the way your case was handled. This is a small increase from
last year, which is good news. 84% of you were also satisfied with the way your case was managed. 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 We will make sure all feedback from estate inspections is available to residents 10 days after the inspection has taken place. We will continue working with our existing community groups and identify which other communities we need to work more closely with. We will encourage more residents to take part in completing satisfaction surveys and have monitors for all the areas that we work in. We will work with our resident cleaning monitors and our contractors, G&G, to agree a new satisfaction rate target. We will continue to carry out regular review meetings with our grounds maintenance contractors, Lotus & Countrywide, to make sure your satisfaction remains high.
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Be an ambitious and successful business
Delivering your services in 2012 Our rent arrears were 5.99% of all the rent due to us. Some of this figure is due to the impact of the government’s welfare reforms and the affect it is having on our residents. We are supporting those of our residents who are affected, but rent and service charge income is our main source of funding. Rent collection remains our main priority so we can continue to deliver high quality services to our residents. It makes more sense to plan our repairs and improvements. 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). We will continue to reinvest these savings into your homes, communities and services.
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How every ÂŁ1 of your rent is spent
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Ch ar S ge er Re Co vic nt st e H L s om os s es F & rom Ba E d m De pt bt y In s te re & st o M n or Lo tg a ag ns es
an H ag ou em sin en g t
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ai Rep nt a en irs an & ce
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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 ÂŁ1.5 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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