Our Resident's Meeting
2024 - February, Our news
On 19 February PA Housing held our first all-residents event. Hosted by our Chief Executive, Mike McDonagh, we welcomed residents to our office in Leicester and, via video call, from across our communities.
Mike opened with an acknowledgement that PA is not currently where it wants to be as an organisation. We’ve seen through recent tenant satisfaction surveys, that we are not consistently meeting your expectations across several areas. However, we are committed to getting better. That commitment means making improvements across the whole of our organisation and how we serve our communities. Ultimately, at PA what we want for our communities is the same as our residents – we both want safe, warm, affordable homes; communities that we all feel proud of; and a culture where we work together to deliver shared outcomes.
Our ask is for residents to come on the journey with us– we know that we still have a long way to go but we want to show through our actions that we are committed to improving.
One of the aims of the meeting was to highlight for our residents what we’ve done, or are planning to do, to improve things. Read on to find out more.
Repairs and Maintenance
We know that, in the past, we didn’t invest in your homes and there is a backlog of work that needs to be undertaken to bring things up to the standard we would all expect. In light of that, we’re committing an additional £10m each year over the next four years to carry out this work. This will bring huge improvements, but it will take time to carry out the necessary works.
In addition to this activity, we are committed to improving our reactive repairs service. To ensure a better experience for our residents, we’ve taken the decision to bring more of our repair work back in-house. That means from the 1 April 2024, the vast majority of work in our Midlands region will be carried out by our own people – you have told us that you prefer this approach.
In London and the South-East, our long-term plan is to replicate this model and have our own work force. However, due to the complexities of this region, we recognise that this will take a number of years to make a reality. In the meantime, we will be putting in place a new agreement with our repairs contractor. Alongside this, we’re trialling innovative approaches to help deliver improvements more quickly. A good example is our recent partnership with Plentific who provide a quick response service on our behalf and where we’ve seen very positive feedback from residents in respect of service standards.
We also want to maintain our homes so that that people feel proud to live in them. That’s why we’re aiming to bring in the “PA Standard” – this will be higher than the industry “Decent Homes” standard. That means areas such as kitchens and bathrooms will be replaced when there is a genuine need to do so rather than how long they have been in a property. We will be setting out details of the PA Standard later this year but acknowledge that we won’t be able to start the work for the next 3-4 years due to us also needing to work through the backlog of repairs. However, we know that offering well maintained homes is key to meeting our commitment to our residents.
Neighbourhoods and our Residents
A real focus for everyone at PA is to know the people who live behind the door of our homes and who make up our communities. We’ve put this principle into action by expanding our team of Neighbourhood Co-ordinators from 34 to 56 (with plans to expand the team even further to 65 co-ordinators). In doing so, we’ve given each co-ordinator a smaller patch to manage (aiming for under 400 homes each) – making it easier for them to get to know their community and helping you access our services. Over the coming months we will be working up distinct neighbourhood plans for each of our neighbourhoods – meaning we can deliver what’s important to the people in that specific area. These will be available in the Autumn.
Being resident-lead is at the core of our strategy going forward. We know that we must maintain the trust of our residents and we aim to do that through actions not words. On an individual level, Mike indicated that he is willing to meet residents and responds personally to any e-mail or letter from a resident. We are putting residents at the heart of our decision making – we’ve recently refreshed our Resident Assembly and in July we will launch our Youth Assembly – giving younger people the opportunity to tell us more about their lived experience and what they want from the communities they live in. Our Share Owners and Leaseholders are an important part of PA and are represented on the new Assembly. In addition, we will be setting up a smaller group made up exclusively of these tenure types to ensure we hear their views clearly.
We have heard your concerns around anti-social behaviour. We know that when these things happen it can dramatically affect a community and is often a complex problem to solve. We’re now working on a new approach to tackle this issue and work with our residents to make improvements.
Customer Service
Currently, you wait too long when you need to speak with us. In recognition of this, we will be launching a new telephone system in April with an aim to cut waiting times to 15 minutes. That’s a start but we need to be even better so, over time, we will make improvements to reduce these wait times even further.
We also know that too often you have to make the effort to follow up when we’ve promised to do something. We will be improving our My PA app so that you can manage your service requests simply and easily plus keep track of where things stand. However, when things do go wrong, we need to give you the confidence that complaints will be treated seriously. To this end, we’re carrying out a thorough review of how we manage complaints – during which we’ll be aided by residents. Their insights and experience will help us as we look at how we meet our commitments to you when you feel we have let you down.
Many residents have told us that they have seen an improvement in the way we communicate but we know we still need to get better at this. We need to see things from your viewpoint - showing more empathy and understanding when we engage with you. That will often mean needing to have adult-to-adult conversations, but we will do so with openness and integrity.
Service Charges
Against the backdrop of rising costs of living, times have been tough for many people. Knowing that, we’re working hard to manage service charges whilst continuing to invest in and develop our communities. In setting this year’s charges, around 7,000 residents will see a reduction in what they pay. Where charges do increase it will mean less than a 50p per week increase for a further 2,500 of our residents. There are some increases for our remaining residents, and we know any increase in charges is a difficult one but reflects the underlying cost of the services being provided.
What we are doing is working hard to obtain the best value from these contracts. To manage costs in this area, we are looking at whether, in the future, we can offer residents the choice over the level of service charge for their neighbourhood. We’re also trialling a scheme wherein we use our own cleaners in our blocks. Whilst reducing cost, we hope it also provides improved cleanliness alongside a greater sense of community through our residents regularly seeing the same person helping to look after their building.
Rent
We’re following Government guidance on how to set our rent and this means it will increase by 7.7%. For our shared owners, it will be in accordance with the specific lease agreement. Again, being aware of the broader financial pressures in society, we are committed to making funds available to support our most in need residents and to help people access support from other organisations. If you are facing financial hardship please contact us.
Final words……
In holding the all-residents event, we are living our promise to be more open, engage with our residents and be honest about our performance. The above should give you an idea of some of our key priorities at PA Housing. As an organisation, we’re committed to making these happen and have put them front centre in our new Corporate Plan - which sets out in more detail everything that we plan to do to improve the communities that we serve and how we will measure our success in meeting these aims. We will be sharing this new Corporate Plan in April.
