Foreword

Welcome to our second Housing Investment Plan, which sets out our local plans for the next four years. Following feedback from our customers, we hope this report is reader friendly and information is easy to find.

We continue to meet our statutory duties and to provide our housing services across Northern Ireland. We face many challenges in the current financial climate and we continue to do our best to deliver our services across the board.

Four high level outcomes related to housing and associated services have shaped our plans:

1. Helping people find housing support and solutions; 2. Delivering better homes; 3. Fostering vibrant sustainable communities; and 4. Delivering quality public services.

Our Housing Investment Plan reports on our progress over the past twelve months and presents our programmes for the coming year. We have aligned our outcomes to those of the Community Plans and continue to engage with Community Planning Partners to deliver housing services locally.

In order to better meet the needs of our tenants and other customers we have developed a Customer Excellence Strategy 2017-20; this aims to deliver continuing improvement for all our customers. We are also improving our Housing Options service to help people find support and solutions to suit their housing needs and, more importantly, to prevent homelessness. We support our tenants to help them remain in their homes, including provision of financial inclusion information as necessary. We will encourage more tenants to get involved in our Social Enterprise Strategy, and we will pilot a digital inclusion project to assist in accessing services and applying for Universal Credit online. In addition, we will continue our work with the much valued Housing Community Network to future proof our services.

Professor Peter Roberts Chair