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Somer Community HT improves performance & satisfaction following inspection
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| Saturday 11th September 2010 |
Performance is up at Somer Community Housing Trust following an inspection into its gas safety, lettings and empty homes services in March. Meanwhile, the latest independent satisfaction survey shows the number of residents who are happy with the Trust's overall service is up.
The Audit Commission carried out its short-notice inspection on behalf of social housing's regulator, the Tenant Services Authority (TSA). It made a number of recommendations to improve the three services it looked at, and set tight deadlines to meet them. All of the actions were variously due for completion by the end of July or the end of August.
The Audit Commission has now published its final report, taking into account the action plan that was developed and setting out its judgement on the Trust's prospects for improvement. Based on evidence of the Trust's track record of improvements and how well performance was managed at the time of the inspection, the report rates those prospects as 'uncertain', but recognises that strengths outweighed weakness in the Trust's capacity to improve.
In the meantime, an independent 'STATUS' survey into resident satisfaction has been carried out on behalf of the Trust by BMG Research Ltd. This survey takes place every three years and showed overall satisfaction had risen to 84% from 80% in 2007.
Angela Gascoigne, Managing Director of Somer Community Housing Trust, said: 'Short notice inspection always focus on your weaker areas, but we had plans already in progress to deal with these shortfalls. This has been borne out by the short timescales the Audit Commission set us to complete their recommendations and their confidence in our capacity to improve.
'We've been working with residents to improve all of our services, and their priorities were to look at our repairs and older persons' services, which is where we've been focussing our attention and delivered massive improvements over the last year. The increase in satisfaction in our latest STATUS survey has shown this to be the right approach.'
These are some of the areas the Trust has improved against the inspector's findings:
Empty properties take a long time to re-let, the re-let standard is basic, and tenants are not given information on what standard to expect -
• The time that homes stay empty has already been halved since the inspection to 26 days as at the end of July, which is just two days off putting the Trust in the top 25 per cent of all housing associations' performance.
• The Trust has developed an improved, clearer re-let standard with residents.
External auditing of gas safety inspections shows they are not meeting good practice levels -
• The gas safety service was already in the middle of a fundamental review at the time of the inspection, and the changes were about to be implemented.
• Gas servicing has been changed from an 11-month to a 10-month cycle. As a result, all services are now being completed within the statutory requirement of a year, with the exception of one service where legal action is being taken.
There are no service standards currently in place -
• At the time of the inspection, these were being finalised with residents and were due to be considered by the Trust board in May. They were agreed and have been published and distributed to all residents.
• The service standards also set out how the Trust will monitor performance, in agreement with residents, and this new framework has been put in place.
Telephone performance and complaints handling is not consistently monitored -
• Better monitoring of performance on answering and dealing with telephone calls is now in place and performance is also checked through an established group of resident 'mystery shoppers'.
• The complaints policy and procedure has been reviewed and will be considered by the Trust board in September.
Information collected about tenants has not been used to tailor and direct services -
• A 'customer profiling' project to collect more accurate data about tenants was already underway. Data is being collected and the findings will be analysed to ensure that we deliver services to meet customers' specific needs. |
| Posted by 0 for Somer Community Housing Trust |
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