Welcome
to the customer
annual review for 2017
This review is designed to let you know how we’ve performed for you
over the last 12 months. Whether you rent, part own your home, live in
one of our specialist homes or have bought one of our homes outright,
you’ll find a wealth of information about the things that you’ve told us
are important to you.
Throughout the review there are links to find out more
information on all the subjects we talk about. Follow
these to get into the nitty gritty of how your feedback is
shaping the way we work, making sure that we’re staying
on track and giving you the homes, neighbourhoods and
services that you want.
Last year we promised to invest in a number of
important areas. We’ll go into more detail throughout
this review but here are some of the keys things we’ve
been focusing on during the last 12 months:
• We’ve continued to invest in our relationship
with each and every one of you with an increase
in neighbourhood coaches and money advisors
as promised last year. We’re starting to see the
difference these services are making now that we
have more time to spend with you and you can read
more about this, including a couple of your stories,
on page 12 For those of you who haven’t met your
neighbourhood coach yet, we’re now live in all our
areas and we hope to get round to you as soon as
possible.
• You told us that being able to pay your heating
bills was a big worry. So this year we’ve invested
heavily in your homes, spending more that £25m
on improvements, many focusing on helping you to
keep you and your homes warm for less. This work
has improved energy efficiency in around 3,000
of your homes. You’ll find more details on these
improvements on page 8
• Last year we said we would deliver around 3,100
new homes over the next five years. We did better
than expected over the last 12 months, completing
on 460 new homes (compared to our target of 436)
and we started building another 778 – our target
here was 600. During the past 12 months we’ve
developed an exciting new plan which means that
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CUSTOMER ANNUAL REVIEW 2017
we are now set out to deliver more than 5,300 new
homes over the next five years – more about this can
be found on page 22.
With the tragic events of the Grenfell Tower fire fresh in
everyone’s minds, we wanted to take this opportunity to
share with you some of the work we do to ensure that
each and every one of you living in our homes are as safe
as possible.
As a responsible social landlord, the safety and security
of you, our customers, has always been our number one
priority and we spend around £400,000 every year on
things such as replacement and upgraded fire doors,
alarm systems, smoke seals, emergency lighting, fire
blankets and similar safety equipment.
All of our colleagues are committed to ensuring that you
are kept safe. We have colleagues dedicated to carrying
out regular fire-risk assessments in all of our homes
where there is a communal facility (shared entrance,
stairwell etc). In addition to this, smoke alarms are fitted
on all floors of all of our homes and regular safety checks
are completed on gas and other combustible fuel heating
systems, during which all smoke alarms are tested too.
For added reassurance, following the tragic events
in London, we took the decision to check all of our
buildings over three storeys to ensure the same type
of cladding wasn’t used and we can safely say that it
wasn’t.
We’ve got loads of advice on our website to help you
stay safe, so please take a look here to find out more.
Thank you for taking the time to read this review. We’d
love to know what you think – and if you have any ideas
of how it can be improved for next year, please let us
know. Take a look at page 20.