Monday 12 May 2008

Housing Services

Residents judge us on how effectively we handle the issues that matter most to them. 

In the last 12 months we updated and published our new Residents Charter which sets the targets we should achieve and we are also just about to publish a companion document, the Residents Responsibilities Charter.  Residents also lead the Charter Monitoring Group which checks that we are meeting our performance targets.

The priorities for the Housing Services department over the next few months are:

• to complete the merging of our housing and maintenance customer service teams. Residents told us they wanted one central Customer Service Team which will be able to deal with the majority of telephone enquiries. This will be completed by 1st April 2008.

• launching the new estate services and repairs contracts.  Residents told us they were not happy with the levels of service they were getting for estate services (such as gardening, cleaning etc) and for repairs and maintenance.  We will be working with three new companies, Connaught for estates services and FWA and Axis for repairs.

• effectively tackling anti-social behaviour (ASB) remains a priority, to ensure our estates and neighbourhoods are places where people want to live.

• the Community Development team have begun the consultation process to help them update the Community Development and Resident Involvement Strategy.

• upgrading houses in multiple occupation which includes installing new fire and alarm detection systems as well as upgrading measures to stop fire spreading.

• ensuring all Wandle's homes will meet the Decent Homes Standard by 2010. We currently have 310 homes which need improvement to meet the standard. In the past 10 years we have invested £32 million on carrying out re-improvements, major repairs and planned improvements. Because of this, and because we build a lot of new homes our stock profile is quite young - 72% of our general needs housing has been re-improved or newly built since 1988.