In our first year as Southern Housing, we've invested over £43.8m into our existing homes to ensure our properties meet the decent homes standard as well as government targets for sustainability, and to ensure our residents have a home they feel proud to live in.
The merger has provided us an opportunity to combine teams with significant knowledge and expertise that will only benefit our residents as we begin to implement improvements to how we work and the service they receive. We have remained focused on ensuring continuation of the planned works programme during not only a period of adaptation during a merger, but through a period that has seen increased pressure on the industry.
This year we have replaced:
- 1,113 kitchens
- 1,015 bathrooms
- 730 doors
- 1,122 windows
- 98 roofs.
We have also invested over £6m into external and internal communal redecoration works benefitting 4,331 homes.
Our programmes are collated using property data from our Asset Management team which assesses the condition of each property enabling us to assign all key components with a specific replacement year.
The unexpected can happen with unplanned properties requiring investment on an urgent basis. We constantly review our programmes so that when situations arise, we can adapt to accommodate. Due to our close relationship with our responsive repairs team we can often find a solution for unplanned works. Our new referral system is in place for occasions when we’re unable to schedule works into the current year’s programme. If investment is required our responsive repairs team can undertake the work to ensure residents needs are met within the year.
As one of the largest housing associations in the country we have an opportunity to shape the attitude towards future investment in social housing, as we begin to look at the next 10-20 years and how we can adapt our approach to provide the best possible service to our residents in the most efficient way.
We’ve been working closely with our long-standing contractors to ensure we can deliver additional benefits to our residents above what is expected, and our goal is always to exceed expectations, from improving their estates with new play areas and football grounds, to providing food hubs that provide much needed support to the local communities.
Up to 2.5% of our Capital Investment contracted spend is extracted from our contractors for social value projects to enhance our local communities and to support residents in need. As part of our procurement requirements and our commitment to extracting social value benefits from our major contracts we will work with our front-line colleagues and residents to co-create social value projects to decide which estate improvements would best benefit residents in the area.
It is gratifying to see the positive impact the programmes have on our residents. These benefits are not limited to their new kitchens, windows, bathrooms, but the social value derived from our contractors has also contributed to the wellbeing of our residents. One of such is the Greener Bromsgrove Project which has just won the National Housing Maintenance Federation Award for Best Customer Impact. The hard work across the Capital Investment team over the past year has ensured we were able to continue to deliver our planned works programme to a high quality and high rate of customer satisfaction whilst going through a merger and subsequent integration.
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