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Annual Report 2018-19

Annual Report 2018–19

How are we doing?

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Every year we tell you about our financial performance. We also report back to you on how we measure up against the important service commitments we make to our customers.

Financial reports, that include value for money statements can be found on our Group website - www.housingplusgroup.co.uk. Here is an at-a-glance guide to our performance in key areas.

Income and expenditure

How your rent is spent The government sets the level of rents that we can charge and we work hard to ensure that the income we receive is well spent and gives value for money How each pound of your rent is spent:

Investment in new homes 26p

Staff costs and overheads 25p

Interest on our loans 19p

Repairs and services to our homes 18p

Improvements to your home 9p

Services to your home and communal areas 3p

Value for money

84% of customers feel their rent provides value for money.

We spent £9.4m (63%) of our Group budget with 180 suppliers in Staffordshire and Shropshire, helping to support and benefit local communities.

Bringing our Staffordshire grounds maintenance service in-house enabled us to employ 12 local people, save £130k and deliver an improved service.

Involving and empowering our customers

Over 122 involved customers regularly share their views to help us improve our services.

The customer panel, along with a growing number of customer insights collected from the virtual panel, contributed to the development of a number of key policies, service standards and communications.

The customer-led scrutiny panel volunteered 247.5 hours of their time. 11 actions were implemented from their recommendations in 2 key projects.

One of these key projects looked at whether the Group was on target to deliver improvements to our repairs and maintenance service, promised as a result of the STAR survey to address the fall in customer satisfaction.

The panel checked whether customers’ concerns about the service had been addressed and reviewed the results of improvements. This led to a higher satisfaction rate and an overall increase in value for money.

You can find out more about our Let’s Talk campaign and how you can register to get involved at www.ssha.co.uk/my-home/get-involved-lets-talk

Customer services

Overall customer satisfaction with our call centre was 89%.

We answered 75,276 calls from you, with 74% of your queries being resolved the first time you call, against a target of 75%.

65% of calls were answered within 30 seconds, against a target of 75%

54 customers were welcomed at our Acton Gate reception.

1,575 email enquiries were answered.

147,350 people visited our website and 1,256 people followed our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Customer satisfaction

181 complaints were received.

32% of complaints were responded to within the 10 day target.

88% of all complaints received were resolved at Stage 1 of our complaints process.

79% of complaints were acknowledged within two days.

A new gas contractor was appointed and as a result, complaints in that area were significantly reduced by 78.9%.

The average amount of time taken to respond to a complaint is 21.6 days which is outside of our service level agreement of 10 working days. We are working hard to monitor and improve this.

Your neighbourhood

330 starter tenancy and follow-up visits were carried out.

138 tenancy agreement changes were made, including mutual exchanges, succession and assignments.

We undertook 1,346 communal block fire safety inspections.

167 no access cases for gas and electrical inspections were dealt with successfully.

Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB)

We are committed to helping customers experiencing ASB. We dealt with 72 new cases of ASB, 33 of which resulted in us taking legal action, including 23 injunctions.

244 environmental ASB cases were also resolved which included fly tipping and abandoned vehicles.

Your community

Employment and money advice

Our employment and money advice team received 241 customer referrals for 528 different areas of support, achieving money savings of nearly £1.2m.

Money savings are defined as any increased income for customers, through effective debt management, increased/ additional welfare benefits or access to grant and trust funding.

Building Better Opportunities (BBO)

We engaged with 29 people to help them into employment, further education or work placements. 24 of these people attended local job clubs and 21 completed personal development courses.

Your tenancy

We made a commitment to keep rent arrears below 2.5%

Result: rent arrears were 1.72% in 2018–19

We let 333 homes, 30 of which were newly built properties.

Of those applicants:

30 were in the Gold Priority band

78 were in the Gold band

146 were in the Silver band

79 were in the Bronze band

We spent nearly £603k improving and repairing homes that became vacant.

Your home

Improvement work

Over £3.9m of our total budget was spent making planned improvements to our homes, including:

171 new kitchens

374 new bathrooms and wetrooms

393 central heating systems

504 new doors

23 rewires

Well maintained homes

We spent over £10.7m on repairing, maintaining and improving homes.

13,595 property repairs were completed.

Across the Group, 93% of customers were satisfied with the repair service they received.

96.05% of routine repairs were completed within target.

Over 13,000 safety first inspections were completed to safeguard our customers and their homes with overall safety compliance for all areas across the Group at 99%.

New homes

We built 168 new homes across the Group, our highest ever number with the following tenures:

Affordable and social rent 125

Shared ownership 43

100% of customers told us that they were either very satisfied or fairly satisfied with their new home.

For every £1 invested in the building of new homes, the social return for the local area was up to £8.54 and this equates to a staggering £176m across the Group.

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