Summer's over

I can’t believe summer is over!

A blog update from Brendan Ryan 7/9/11

A jam-packed summer saw our tenant representatives and board members visit the Houses of Parliament to speak about their involvement in East Kent Housing, Mears started working on repairs in Dover adding to their contracts in Thanet and Canterbury and our new Area Managers were appointed.

Our Area Boards met for the first time; these new bodies will strengthen accountability to both local tenants and councillors and will play an important role from now on, scrutinising our performance and what we do.

We recently welcomed two new Board Members – Cllr Jennifer Matterface as the Thanet Council member and Chris Hanagan, a tenant from Dover nominated by the District Tenants Group.  The leadership of our Board is vital to the success of East Kent Housing and I know our new members bring a wealth of skills and experience to the Board.

September is going to be our busiest month yet.  We are working with the Board, tenant representatives on the Area Boards, our staff and colleagues in the four councils to write next year’s delivery plan. The plan will set out our improvement plans for next year.    

Comments received from tenants during this summer’s tenants’ survey will also be used to help us write the delivery plan and we are holding a conference of tenants from the Area Boards next week to look at other ideas for the plan.

The time that I have spent visiting our estates in recent months and talking to tenants and staff has given me lots of ideas on what I think we need to improve. It’s a long list and may keep us busy for a few years to come. What was especially encouraging from the recent tenants’ survey was the number of positive comments that tenants made about EKH and the people who work for us. Knowing that people appreciate what we do is a great boost and will inspire us to work even harder to provide a first class service.

We are beginning to work with tenant representatives to decide how the Area Boards can be used to scrutinise what we do. I would like to thank all the tenants and staff who gave up time to take part in the recent tenant scrutiny workshops.

Our Annual Report will be published in October and the tenant communications group have again played an important role in designing the report in a tenant friendly way.  It amazing to read in the reports what we achieved last year completing a large number of improvements to tenants’ homes to make sure that we fully met the Decent Homes standard before the target dates. All this was done against the back drop of setting up East Kent Housing and transferring the service from the four councils.  We are confident that we can build on the good work of the councils and make even more improvements in the years ahead.

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