Social Housing (the Regulator). This Standard and its accompanying Code of Practice requires registered providers of social housing to annually report on their performance against a suite of measures defined by the Regulator, along with their own value for money metrics and targets with which they measure the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of their services and operations: • Economy: minimising the cost of resources used while having regard to quality. • Efficiency: the relationship between the output from the goods or services and the resources to produce them. • Effectiveness: the extent to which objectives are achieved and the relationship between intended and actual impacts. Our commitment to our residents We continuously review the services provided to our residents and the way in which they are delivered to ensure we are focusing on the right things at the right time and adding value. Responding to the increased cost of utilities, we implemented a strategy of forward purchasing gas and electricity at optimum prices throughout the year, rather than committing to high fixed rates, thereby ensuring that our residents benefited from the best value energy. We will maintain this approach in the coming year. Our Be Wise service provides free and impartial advice, support and practical assistance to help residents make the most of their money. This service has supported residents to claim around £8.0m of unclaimed benefits during the year (2023: £4.3m), providing much-needed support in a year which saw continuing increases in everyday living costs. Our Resident Support Fund, launched in 2023, continued to provide support for residents who were struggling to pay for basic essentials such as white goods. The total support given to residents was £0.3m. In April 2024, the Regulator of Social Housing launched its new Consumer Standards: the Safety and Quality Standard, the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard, the Neighbourhood and Community Standard, and the Tenancy Standard. These new standards are all designed to protect social housing tenants and the services they receive and will apply to all social landlords. We are committed to meeting the requirements of these new standards which aim to ensure that tenants are safe in their homes; that landlords listen to tenants’ complaints and respond promptly to put things right, are accountable to tenants and treat them with fairness and respect, know more about the condition of every home and the needs of the people who live in them and collect and use data effectively across a range of areas, including repairs.
Listening to our residents We are committed to listening to our residents and using their insight to improve our services. The diverse spread of our properties and services gives us the scope to find new initiatives and ways to engage with our residents. Our residents are actively encouraged to get involved in any way they can and to provide insights which help us improve the services we provide. This can be through involved groups such as the Residents’ Voice Panel and/or one of the special topic forums to help shape policies and strategies. There are also opportunities to influence through local meetings with colleagues and via our satisfaction surveys. We also provide support and opportunities for residents to gain skills and confidence in this area. Our Residents’ Council is made up of up to 12 residents who work with us collaboratively to improve and develop services and hold us to account. We also have a Scrutiny Panel of engaged residents whose role is to ask questions, review our services and make recommendations to improve the services we provide. The satisfaction of our residents is extremely important to us, and we periodically ask for their feedback on how our services are meeting their expectations. Our overall satisfaction results for the year were 86.0% (2023: 85.1%) for low cost rented housing residents and 68.8% (2023: 68.8%) for homeownership residents. The most common complaints were about the location manager service and local management decisions, such as around car parking, and the time taken to complete repairs. Lessons from complaints and resident feedback inform our improvement actions. We are making significant changes to improve how we respond to complaints, including a more centralised approach. A trial of this new way of working for rented housing in the North West has seen significantly increased levels of satisfaction from residents. We have recruited and trained 15 additional colleagues and are rolling this pilot approach out into other regions. We’re also introducing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which will make it easier for us to track, monitor, record and report on complaints. We undertake an annual exercise to ensure our complaints handling policy and practice is compliant with the complaint handling code set out by the Housing Ombudsman Service, and self-assessment of Anchor’s compliance is published on our website. Improving complaint handling satisfaction and the experience for our customers continues to be a focus for the coming year.
22 Anchor Hanover Group Annual Report & Financial Statements 2024
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