Breaking the mould
We’re calling on the government to make reforms to the Decent Homes Standard, develop more meaningful key performance indicators and continue to fund more homes and services in the social housing sector.
They are some of the 14 recommendations outlined in our response to the government’s social housing green paper – A new deal for social housing – published in August 2018.
The initial green paper focused on five key themes:
- Ensuring homes are safe and decent
- Effective resolution of complaints
- Empowering residents and strengthening the regulator
- Tackling stigma and celebrating thriving communities
- Expanding supply and supporting home ownership
As a housing provider currently owning and managing about 7,000 properties in the Midlands and North of England, spanning many different local authority areas, we officially responded to the paper through the government’s consultation exercise.
Of the 48 questions posed by the government in the green paper, we responded to 40. These represented the most appropriate themes relating to our history, current activity and proposed work, and more importantly which matter most to the people organisations like us are here to support – our customers.
Responses, led by our senior leaders and frontline teams, were formed through consultations with our customers through our Local Management Board, Tenant Led Scrutiny Panel and our insight survey, providing us with feedback from more than 250 customers.
Our responses include relevant supporting evidence, including from our 2018 research report More than bricks, which explores the need for housing providers to deliver support services, recent customer insight survey results and recent performance data.
In addition, we have also engaged with and fed into other responses, including TPAS, the Chartered Instituted of Housing, the National Housing Federation, and the Research Users In Housing (RUSH) network.
And following the publication of our response, we held a roundtable of social housing providers and local stakeholders in Sheffield.