Annual Report 2018-19

How are we doing?

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

85% of customers feel their rent provides value for money.

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

Converting Severnside to a charitable organisation enabled us to save £100k.

Your tenancy

We made a commitment to keep rent arrears below 2.5%

Result: rent arrears were 1.18% in 2018–19

We let 491 homes, 72 of which were newly built properties.

We spent over £555k improving and repairing homes that became vacant.

Customer services

Overall customer satisfaction with our call centre was 87%.

We answered 67,191 calls from you, achieving our target to resolve 75% of queries the first time you call.

66% of calls were answered within 30 seconds, against a target of 75%.

9,380 customers were welcomed at our Brassey Road reception.

1,786 email enquiries were answered.

90,150 people visited our website and 4,563 people followed our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

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 scrutinypanel 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.severnsidehousing.co.uk/register-get-involved

Customer satisfaction

149 complaints were received.

29% of complaints were responded to within the 10 day target.

90% of all complaints received were resolved at Stage 1 of our complaints process.

66% 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 home

Improvement work Nearly £3.5m of our total budget was spent making planned improvements to our homes, including:

201 new kitchens

327 new bathrooms and wet rooms

301 central heating systems

40 rewires

Well maintained homes

We spent over £10.5m on repairing, maintaining and improving homes .

11,587 property repairs were completed.

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

93.8% 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, 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.