Local Offers: service standards for your area

Many of the standards you can expect from the services we provide are already in place, such as appointment times for repairs and how long we should take to get back to you when you contact us.  

But we know we can improve further - and last summer we spoke to tenant groups and residents about what's important to them and where we could do better.  We've used this information to develop some new service standards, which we've called our local offers.

What are the Local Offers for Canterbury?

Our local standards on...

1. Involving Tenants

What we will do

• Provide information leaflets about our key service areas, such as:

• • Money matters (financial inclusion)
  • Sheltered housing
  • Housing advice
  • Anti-social behaviour
• Work with tenants to improve the service standards for complaints and customer care.
• Publish more information about customer satisfaction on the web, as well as how we are performing in our sheltered housing service, with cleaning, and with maintaining our estates.

• Develop a questionnaire to collect more information about tenants and leaseholders in order to better tailor our service to your needs.

• Set up new tenant-driven service improvement groups, including:

  • • Responsive Repairs Group

    • Capital Works Group

    • Disability Forum

    • Anti-social Behaviour Serious Case Review Group

• Continuing our accountability to tenants through reporting to the Performance Review Group.

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    2.  Home

    What we will do

    • Develop a new Adaptations Policy with tenants, through groups such as the Disability Forum.
    • Ensure that all houses have mains smoke alarms.
    • Publish a Contractor Code of Conduct to ensure that tenants get the best service from our contractors.
    • Comply with our Planned Maintenance Compact, which has been developed with tenants and leaseholders.
    • Publish a five-year programme of planned maintenance work to keep tenants and leaseholders prepared and informed.
    • Write to tenants to inform them of any works planned to their home at the start of each financial year.
    • Ensure that contractors write to tenants to inform them of the date that any planned works are due to start, giving reasonable notice.
    • Provide basic DIY training for tenants with Mears.
    • Train tenants, with our contractors, to inspect our standards of cleaning, repairs, and empty homes.
    • Produce a new repairs handbook.

    • Our responsive repairs service will:

      • provide a free phone number for tenants to report repairs to their home and heating system;
      • provide an out of hours emergency service to all tenants;
      • offer tenants appointments within a two-hour slot; and
      • offer appointments on two evenings during the week and on Saturday mornings, if the work is of a simple nature.
    • Ensure that all empty properties are available for re-letting in the shortest possible time whilst achieving the high quality agreed with tenants.
    • Ensure that Gas Safety Inspections are carried out within 12 months to all properties that require them.
    • Ask for tenants' feedback on repairs so that we can further improve the service.
    • Inspect the communal hallway of every block of flats on a monthly basis to check fire safety standards.

     

    3. Neighbourhood and Community

    What we will do

    • Revise our policy and procedure for dealing with racist and hate crimes.
    • Measure the quality of estate services, by developing a pictorial guide for estate grading (this is a set of pictures which estates will be compared against to measure how well kept they are).
    • Train resident monitors and staff to grade our estates.
    • Work with tenants from the other areas covered by East Kent Housing to quality check estate services.  Tenants will be able to inspect each other's estates.
    • Set out clear standards for the quality of our estates and put them on noticeboards and on the web.
    • Set up a support group for tenants suffering the effects and nuisance of anti-social behaviour.
    • Review our policies and procedures for anti-social behaviour with our tenant groups.
    • Set up and take part in initiatives which will help unemployed tenants to get back into work.

     

    4. Tenancy and Rents

    What we will do

    • Develop service standards for sheltered and enhanced schemes with the Sheltered Forum and resident representatives from the schemes.
    • Give all tenants a copy of the Lettings Standard, which sets out the standards that tenants can expect when they move into a property.
    • Improve our rent statements to make them easier to understand.
    • Use all the available types of tenancy, such as introductory and demoted tenancies, in order to help tackle tenants who do not stick to their tenancy agreements, such as by engaging in anti-social behaviour.
    • Continue to tackle all types of tenancy fraud to ensure our housing goes to those who need it most.
    • Develop a Financial Inclusion Strategy, setting out how we will help our tenants facing financial difficulties.
    • Offer a 'financial health check' for each tenant upon beginning their tenancy, to discuss issues such as rent and benefits.
    • Tell applicants how much it costs to set up and run a home, before they begin their tenancy.
    • Provide good quality web information showing where tenants can go for independent advice when they fall into financial difficulty.

     

    5.  Value for Money

    What we will do

    • Involve tenants even more in setting budgets, such as deciding how the environmental improvement budget is spent.
    • Work with our tenant groups to agree planned programmes of works to properties.
    • Work with our tenants and Mears to make the most of the 'extras' in the responsive repairs contract to achieve value for money, such as tenant DIY training.
    • Work with more community-based and voluntary schemes in order to save money, and continue to work with initiatives such as Community Payback to carry out works on our estates at no cost.

     

    How we will report on our progress

    These offers were all in place by 31 March 2011.

     

    Some of these offers involved a single action, and are therefore complete; others involve ongoing actions across a period of time, and we will regularly feed back on our performance against these by:

    • publishing our progress on this website;
    • publishing our progress in the local section of your East Kent Housing newsletter;
    • reporting to our Performance Review Group; and
    • reporting to East Kent Housing's Area Board.