Housing standards and publications

Our housing service standards and publications set out our responsibilities as a social landlord and details how we strive to deliver high quality services.

Service standards

We aim to provide an excellent service to our tenants.

To help us achieve this we have produced a series of service standards that make it clear what you can expect from us and can be used to measure our performance.

View our service standards documents

These standards have been developed in consultation with staff and tenants.

We check that we are meeting these standards by carrying out spot checks and regular inspections, asking for your feedback through questionnaires and monitoring the complaints we receive about our service.

We report our performance against the standards in our annual report for tenants.

Policies

We have a number of policies and procedures, which set out how we deliver our services.

When we create a new policy or review an existing one, we talk to customers and staff to gain feedback. This is so our policies meet required needs. We also work with other authorities on joint projects such as sustainable heating and energy improvements.

View our policies documentation

Strategies

We have a number of priorities and legal requirements that relate to housing, homelessness and supporting people in their homes. A number of strategies have been developed to help us to deliver these priorities and legal duties.

Our strategic housing documents have been developed using comprehensive research to help set our priorities.

View our strategy documentation

Performance

We use performance management to help us improve the service we provide to our customers. We have a Performance Management Framework (downloads a Microsoft Word document) which details our objectives and targets and how our plans and policies link together to achieve these.

The best way of monitoring our progress is to use very specific measures that describe what we are aiming to achieve to help us to decide how we can tackle problems and change things if we need to. We call these measures key performance indicators. We have worked with our customers and staff to identify these.

One of the tools we use to measure ourselves is benchmarking, where we regularly compare our performance with that of similar sized organisations.

Benchmarking against other organisations is very important to ensure that we are providing the same standard of service as our peers, if not better. It also provides us with the opportunity to work with other housing associations to share ideas and best practice to ultimately improve our service to you.

We are member of Housemark, a national benchmarking organisation. Together with other housing organisations, we supply performance information to Housemark on a quarterly basis.