Annual Report to Tenants 2020-21

How we are doing and where we need to improve

In February 2021, we developed an ambitious Resident Involvement Strategy with residents to demonstrate our commitment to ensuring residents remain at the heart of our service and help you hold us accountable. Since then: 

• Residents have actively participated in the recruitment of Council staff, sitting on interview panels and presenting at staff inductions. 
• The Tenants Consultative Committee (TCC) has met monthly and provided feedback on our   draft policies and procedures, as well as the Housing Revenue Account Budget and Business Plan, and the Capital Works Programme. 
• Critical work, such as the review of our tenancy conditions, sustainability strategy, caretaking and cleaning service, and the development of an asset management strategy have had extensive resident input through various Task and Finish groups.
• Specific resident forums, such as the Repairs Forum and the Disability Forum have remained active, ensuring accountability in these key areas. 
• With the relaxing of social distancing rules, over 24 face-to-face events have been held to listen to residents’ views around the major works on their estates. 
• A number of residents have benefited from a Chartered Institute of Housing accredited ‘Introduction to Housing’ course. 

Other highlights include residents planning and delivering an online summit, featuring several forums on sustainability and financial inclusion, and the Council putting on a wide range of social events with residents, including walking tours and Christmas events.  Additionally, several short films were made celebrating Ramadan and Black History Month. 

Resident Satisfaction Survey

Performance measure	2019-20	2020-21	Target 2020-21
Customer Service Centre – percentage of calls answered	96.06%	93.89%	>=95%
Number of new complaints received	369	393	-
Average number of working days to respond to a Stage One complaint	15.2	14.5	<=15

Performance measure	2019-20	2020-21	Target 2020-21
Tenants - How satisfied are you that the Council’s Housing Management Service lis- tens to your views and acts upon them?	47.0%	No survey	-
Tenants - Taking everything into account, how satisfied are you with the service pro- vided by the Council’s Housing Management service?	60.0%	No survey	-

Customer service, choice and complaints

 Our performance around call handling was affected at the start of the pandemic due to contact centre staff having to relocate to work from home.  Performance improved throughout the year though and continues in an upward trend.  The team is returning to working in the office, which should simplify and speed up their work and more calls are being monitored to identify any issues causing longer call times.  

• We responded to complaints within an average of 15 days – the same as last year. There was a significant improvement in Stage One complaints answered within target – up from 87.63 per cent last year to 90.37 per cent this year. Whilst there have been improvements in response times, there was an increase during the year of complaints escalated to Stage Two, up from just 12 last year to 65 this year.  This is a common trend currently, with the Housing Ombudsman confirming they have seen a significant rise in complaints nationwide.  Our Customer Experience Team have been analysing the reasons behind the increased number of Stage Two complaints and are reviewing our level of service delivery in line with the expectations of our residents.
• Last year, we worked with residents to develop a new compensation policy. We are now reviewing this policy as part of our continual improvement cycle.  Our aim is to ensure the policy is in line with updated guidance from the Housing Ombudsman and to include lessons learned from previous complaints, which are analysed continuously.
• Before Christmas, we published our self-assessment on how we comply with the Complaint Handling Code, which is required annually by the Housing Ombudsman. The code sets out good practice for responding to complaints effectively and fairly.  Through this we have simplified our complaints process down to two stages and have reduced the standard response time for Stage One complaints from 15 to 10 working days. In accordance with the guidance, where it is not possible to meet this target, we will provide an explanation and a new target date within the following 10 working days.  

Involvement and empowerment 

It’s important we hear residents’ opinions on the works we are proposing to carry out to their properties and estates as part of our Capital Works Programme, and what they would like to see. We have been engaging with residents through consultations, Task and Finish groups and more informal drop-in sessions and events – both online and in person.

• Residents have been helping us carry out evaluations of contractors’ tenders and as works continue we will invite residents to join us on site, to review progress and the quality of the works. At the end of the process, residents will be involved in helping us identify any relevant works not carried out by contractors, or not carried out to the correct standard, so these can be rectified.
• Investing in residents’ homes and putting local people at the heart of decision-making are key priorities for the Council. Over the last two years we have worked with residents to form a joint asset management vision for the Council and residents. This vision underpins the asset management strategy, which was developed with the Tenants Consultative Committee (TCC) and signed off by the Leadership Team in March 2021. The Strategy provides an overarching framework to make decisions on retaining, investing in and maintaining Council homes.
• The strategy was also designed to ensure our housing stock meets the needs of our communities and delivers the standards residents expect both now and in the future.  It identifies a range of actions under a seven-year investment programme, the priorities of which are:
  • Priority 1 – Health and Safety issues in the immediate term 
  • Priority 2 – Mechanical and Electrical Components 
  • Priority 3 – Work to ensure the integrity of the building envelope
  • Priority 4 – Sustainability
  • Priority 5 – Modern facilities inside tenants’ homes
• We ran a Task and Finish group with residents before launching our Housing Management Sustainability and Fuel Poverty Strategy, which was signed off by the Council’s Leadership Team in February 2021.  The opinions of residents informed the strategy and helped make recommendations for how we could support, empower and work together to tackle environment-related issues in our housing stock.  We have developed a detailed action plan to meet the aspirations of this policy and are committed to achieving net zero carbon by 2030 as an organisation and by 2040 as a borough.  These goals have led to us developing a new Energy and Sustainability team in Asset Management and we have secured funding from the Government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund to allow us to maximise financial support to our residents.
• We have been consulting with residents on the proposed changes to the Tenancy Agreement, where we want to improve tenancy conditions and living standards for our tenants. To ensure we take onboard all feedback, further refined the proposed changes and worked with concerned residents.  This includes appointing an independent facilitator to work with a group of tenants over a period of six months. The independent facilitator is TPAS, who are the leading experts in tenant involvement, engagement and empowerment in social housing across England.
• The Council’s existing cleaning contract for communal areas of housing blocks ended in September 2021. Residents were invited to take part in the review of the current services via an online survey.  A Residents’ Steering Group, set up last summer, reviewed the existing service and options for future delivery. We had more than 700 responses, which helped identify priorities for improvement and shape the specification of the new service, with more emphasis on local provision.  Consequently, a decision was made to bring the service back in-house, amalgamating caretaking and cleaning services into one role.  We are working with staff, to provide a more joined up service, which we aim to embed throughout the upcoming year.  
• Despite the challenges brought by the Coronavirus pandemic, we still held our annual Residents’ Summit last year. We’ve had to do things differently all year long, and one of the many challenges we faced was to create an interactive, informative and fun online event that would bring as many of our residents together as possible in a virtual environment. 
• To help improve digital involvement, we worked in partnership with two broadband providers to ensure the benefits of digital connectivity are available to all residents. Borough-wide agreements have been entered into with Community Fibre and Hyperoptic, who are currently installing full fibre broadband across Kensington and Chelsea. 
• The Home Ownership team facilitated the quarterly Homeowner Panel. These meetings migrated to an online platform over the last year and were very successful, with a good number of attendees - some attending for the very first time. The team arranged six online seminars in September across two weeks, which dealt with different topics that leaseholders requested and included Q&A sessions. More than 200 homeowners attended and we received very positive feedback.

Understanding and responding to the diverse needs of our tenants

The Council is working towards having a clear overarching approach to equality, diversity and inclusion. The work we are doing in Housing focuses on four key areas:

• Understanding and working with our communities through data collection and data analysis. Using data enables us to tailor our services and take appropriate action in areas such as antisocial behaviour and repairs.  
• Leadership and organisational commitment for every policy, strategy or piece of work we produce. This will ensure we consider all aspects of equalities and train our officers on equality matters and measuring the impact. 
• Responsive services and customer care with a specific focus on engagement with the community, ensuring proper representation. We are also focusing on procurement and how we can embed social value and sustainability into our operations. 
• Diverse and engaged workforce. Our managers have all been trained on inclusive recruitment and we are actively participating in the Council’s wider Equality, Diversity and Inclusion network.

To ensure the views of residents from all different backgrounds are represented, the Community Development team at Lancaster West have recently been working with the Somali, Persian, and Arab communities across the estate, to help develop local services and influence the capital improvements.

For all our resident communications, we can provide a complete suite of alternative formats, including the top seven spoken languages in the borough, plus braille and interpretation services.

Our Visiting Officers have been completing equality monitoring forms with residents, to better understand who our residents are so we can provide bespoke services and support for them.