An update from Brendan Ryan Chief Executive
Friday 17 June was a big day for me.
It was the day I was given the job as Chief Executive of EKH.
It is a real privilege to be entrusted with the responsibility of
leading EKH during this critical period as we complete the set up
of the organisation and establish good working relationships with
our local authority partners. I am grateful to the board for
putting their trust in me and the rest of the team.
We have also during this
period completed other appointments to the senior management team
and details can be found on the news section of the website. We
hope to fill some of the other management positions in the next
couple of weeks. This is all a precursor to looking seriously
at how we can best deliver services in the future and what staffing
arrangements we need to make the most of merging four services in
to one. I appreciate that this is not an easy process and will be a
worrying time for our colleagues. It is important that we uphold
the principles of our values throughout the process.
This week we completed the
first round of our Area Board meetings. Area Boards provide an
opportunity for tenants to hold us to account and scrutinise what
we do. Ward councillors can also get involved in the work of Area
Boards. We intend in the next couple of months to invest in
training to ensure that tenants on the Area Boards have the skills
to challenge our work effectively.
Nationally there continues
to be a high level of interest in what East Kent Housing is doing
and how we came to set up the first multi council ALMO. We have
been featured twice in the last month in Inside Housing and this
week we gave a presentation on the EKH model to MPs in the Houses
of Parliament. One of our colleagues from the councils
recently spoke about East Kent Housing at the National Housing
Conference in Harrogate and I am speaking to the national ALMO
conference next month.
On a more local level, I
have spent much time in recent weeks walking around getting to know
our estates better especially in areas where I have not previously
worked. I have been impressed by some of the initiatives that
local housing officers have developed on their patches especially
to deal with anti social behaviour. However there is still
scope for improvement especially with standards of cleaning and
gardening in some areas. We have developed some great
initiatives to get residents more involved in monitoring conditions
on their estates and this will hopefully help improve standards in
the coming months.
Brendan Ryan
Chief Executive
Contact East
Kent Housing
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