Provide affordable, safe well-maintained homes to a consistent standard

A safe and secure home lays the foundations for people to achieve what they want in life. We work hard to make sure our homes are maintained to a good standard with safety and security front and centre so customers can enjoy living in them and focus on achieving their aspirations.

Customer safety

The safety of our residents remains our top priority. Following Dame Judith Hackitt’s Building a Safer Future Review, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, we’ve taken a proactive response and become a Registered Signatory of the Building a Safer Future Charter. Through this charter we’ve committed to embed a series of recommended principles to make sure people’s safety is always put first.

We’ve continued to take action to make sure our buildings are to the highest safety standard and comply with latest government guidance on building safety.

We’ve taken a phased approach focusing on our highestrisk residential buildings and those over 18 metres reviewing all safety aspects including building materials like cladding, fire doors and wooden balcony decking. We first completed the removal of ACM cladding from 3 blocks of flats in Portsmouth in June 2021, and our work to remove the HPL cladding from 3 blocks in Southampton, Empire View and Gantry Court, and 1 block in Portsmouth, Collins Place, is due finish in early 2023. We’ve also replaced the wooden balcony decking at our block of flats in Gosport, Ark Royal House in February 2022.

We made sure that as soon as this work was identified, we took quick action to ensure the safety of our customers. This included installing fire detection systems, 24/7 ‘waking watch’ fire patrols, and extra checks on communal fire doors to ensure they were fit for purpose. We’re also consulting with our residents at each of our tall buildings to develop a bespoke building safety engagement strategy and customer information sheet to make sure they all know what to do in case of an emergency. Our application for funding from the Building Safety Fund was successful for Empire View and Gantry Court. This means leaseholders and shared owners in these properties won’t have to pay any costs in relation to cladding remediation works. We’ll continue to monitor the Building Safety Fund guidelines and submit further applications for any other buildings where remediation work is necessary, and funding is needed.

Thorough inspections on our buildings over 11 metres are now underway, to ensure our buildings are safe and to identify circumstances where it may be prudent to remove other lower risk building materials. We’re continuing to work with Hampshire Fire and Rescue to ensure all our buildings remain safe for our customers.

Improving our homes

We’ve continued to make improvements to our homes, communal areas and neighbourhoods to make them great places to live.

Our teams have worked really hard to overcome the disruptions caused by COVID services restrictions and more recently the shortage of materials. They have cleared the outstanding jobs from the last lockdown and improved our response times for urgent and emergency repairs. Despite these challenges our customer satisfaction scores averaged 8.8/10 showing the effort our teams have put in to continue delivering a good service.

We’ve worked hard to help improve the appearance and useability in our communities. Throughout the year we’ve gone above and beyond to improve the external communal areas of some of our blocks, installing cycle or mobility stores and completing internal decorations on our blocks of flats and our Howard Road Community Centre in Portsmouth. Following a customer survey, our planned programmes team also completed minor adaptions in our homes to aid residents, which included installing grab bars.

Over the last year we’ve placed a greater focus on supporting customers experiencing issues with damp and mould in their homes. This usually occurs due to poor ventilation and cold spots within a property and sometimes there isn’t a quick fix to resolve the problem. We recognise the impact this has on our customers, so we’ve setup a dedicated damp and mould team who work with our customers and repairs team to ensure we identify the root cause quickly and work with our customers to ensure a resolution.

Here is some of what we’ve achieved over the last year:

£59.5m invested in improving, repairing and maintaining our homes 426 homes installed with grab bars for improved resident mobility

1,600 heating replacements

82,519 responsive repairs completed

Average 6.5hrs to complete emergency repair 4,094 window replacements

23,724 properties with gas certificates

LET Average re-let time of 52.2 days 1,549 door replacements

8.8/10 repairs satisfaction

140 roof replacements 329 bathroom replacements

442 kitchen replacements

Taking action for a greener future

Addressing the energy efficiency of our homes is where we can make the biggest difference to the cost of living for our customers and our impact on the environment.

The government has set targets for all social housing to get up to an energy performance certificate (EPC) band C by 2030. Our plans for achieving this are fully costed, and we’ll go further to make our homes as efficient as possible. Whilst we’re working towards this target our first milestone is to ensure all our homes have an EPC rating of D or above by 2024.

Our sustainability journey will continue to be a major focus for us for many years to come. Over the coming year we’ll explore ways to make our existing homes more energy efficient whilst making sure any new measures are affordable for our customers. We’ll also continue our pilot looking at the feasibility of an electric van fleet for our trade operatives to help lower our business emissions.