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Our strategy
Our vision is to create opportunities for people to live better lives through the provision of better homes and better services.
Our belief is that given the right opportunities at the right time our customers will find their own solutions to improve their lives. Our homes and services offer the foundation to build and shape the rest of their lives.
We are motivated by our purpose, focused on creating opportunities to make real differences to people and the communities where they live.
We provide more than 7,000 homes for people across the Midlands and Yorkshire and Humber. Homes for those who need them, homes for families, homes for students, homes for older people – essentially, homes for everyone. We go beyond bricks and mortar. We focus on the people who live in our homes and the communities in which they live. Our homes are a starting point to help people achieve whatever they want to. We want to make a positive difference and put our customers first in everything we do.
We reinvest income to support more customers by developing and delivering excellent services, maintaining homes to a high standard and developing new homes for those that need them. We are committed to creating better places to live by investing in homes and communities, for current and future generations. However, we know we can do more.
Our Priorities
Our Customers
Our customers are our absolute priority. Everything we do is for the people we serve. We recognise that one size doesn’t fit all. We need to adapt our approach to ensure all customers have access to the same high standard of service across the board. We will do this by:
- Ensuring our repairs service meets our customers’ expectations.
- Involving our customers to design services they want and help us monitor performance.
- Giving our customers more choice in how they communicate with us through digital means such as texting and online services.
- Providing increased support for our customers – both online and face to face.
- Supporting our people to deliver better for our customers, including providing them with the skills, tools and flexibility they need to succeed.
- Being seen out and about in the communities where we work.
Our Way of Working (WOW) programme, which started during 2017, is transforming the way we work – implementing new tools, processes and supporting our people in delivering a service that is truly customer first. It will finish during the timeframe of this strategy and will fundamentally transform the way we work as an organisation and how we support and engage with our customers.
Our Growth
Fundamental to our strategy is growth. Our aspiration to grow not only provides more financial stability but it enables us to make a bigger impact on our charitable aims by helping more people.
We will grow by:
- Developing a range of different tenures including homes for low-cost rent, affordable home ownership and outright sale.
- Increasing our scale of operation to work in new areas further than where we work now.
- Continuing with our new-build programme to develop more homes in areas where we see the greatest need.
- Seeking opportunities for growth through stock purchases or swaps. •Identifying opportunities for us to deliver more through strategic partnerships.
- Developing our service offering to ensure we are supporting customers and the wider community.
- Develop different types of homes that meet our customers’ needs.
- Defining and delivering our support service offering that’s more than bricks.
Our efficiency
We have always taken a commercial approach, operating in an efficient manner, diversifying into other income streams.
As a result, the organisation is financially robust and is well placed to achieve great things in a changing sector.
Our focus during the lifetime of this strategy is on generating maximum value for money (VFM).
We will ensure the way we work is not only delivered in the best way for our customers but maximises efficiencies too.
We will do this by:
- Ensuring we deliver an efficient repairs service that meets our customers’ expectations.
- Delivering improved management information under a business performance management framework.
- Strengthening our procurement practices to deliver greater VFM.
- Developing new tools and technology to deliver more efficiently.
- Recognising our people are key and providing them with a learning environment where personal development is actively encouraged and supported.
- Equipping our people with the tools they need, including processes that work, to do their jobs more effectively.
The implementation of our WOW programme will see the organisation become much more agile and better able to respond to our customers’ needs more efficiently.
For all new services we develop, we will use grant funding wherever possible to ensure we deliver services in line with our Value for Money Strategy.
This way we can always ensure we can show our customers how we spend their money. We will continue to show the social return on what we spend.
This is key to ensure we align to our charitable objectives and vision and show our wider impact as an organisation.
Our partnerships
We know we cannot work alone to achieve our goals.
Through partnership working, we aim to add real value to everyone who lives in our homes, the community and neighbourhood. Ultimately, we will work with others to enhance our service offering and improve the lives of those living in our homes.
We will do this by:
- Building on our strategic links with local authorities and other key partner organisations.
- Implementing targeted and proactive stakeholder engagement and management for all areas we work.
- Identifying opportunities for us to deliver more through strategic partnerships or joint working.
- Continuing to develop relationships with sectors wider than housing to increase our offer for our customers.
- Developing our service offer to ensure we are supporting customers and the wider community.
- Supporting our people to build relationships and knowledge externally.
Our continued stakeholder engagement activity will help to foster and maintain good relationships with identified organisations – not necessarily ones usually associated with social housing.
Cross-sector relationships, partnerships and collaboration are key to combatting some of the issues that many of our customers face.
We will be innovative in our approach, developing models and skills to meet the needs of our customers, and growing skills to meet our own future workforce requirements.
We will ensure that throughout the lifetime of this strategy we develop an external view to the work we do to ensure we are always sharing our best practice and learning from others.
Download our corporate strategy here
