Ashton Pioneer Homes' approach to commencing a journey of resident engagement to inform and improve their repairs and maintenance services, including requirements around building safety.

This case study includes context and challenges relevant to smaller housing providers and is an example and illustration of how providers can begin their response to the Better Social Housing Review (BSHR) recommendation.

Ashton Pioneer Homes (APH) is a small community-based social housing provider situated in the west of Ashton-under-Lyne, a market town in Tameside, Greater Manchester.

Tameside is ranked as the 28th most deprived of 317 local authority districts in England, and the fifth most deprived in Greater Manchester.

APH was established in 1999 following a partial stock transfer from Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council. Prior to transfer, the area had 30 per cent voids, and anti-social behaviour was rife. At this point, APH demolished an area of non-traditionally constructed maisonette blocks, which were at the time a focus and cause of a lot of this anti-social behaviour. These were replaced with traditional brick-built housing. Other maisonette blocks were retained, and partially refurbished, and defensible space was enclosed within fencing with fob access to provide residents with a sense of security.

APH also own and manage seven high rise buildings. Legislative changes around fire and building safety in the time since the Grenfell tragedy have provided us with a number of challenges. This is particularly pertinent given the fact that we are under 1,000 units in total, with more than half our stock being situated within the high-rise.

We have a small in-house repairs team, who also deal with the majority of void works and we use contractors for larger component replacement works such as roofing and kitchen programmes.

The BSHR headline is that all social housing should feel like a home for those who live there, a place for people to feel comfortable and safe, to live well and thrive.

APH have begun a journey to improve resident engagement. As alluded to above, part of our duty under the Building Safety Act is to prepare a resident engagement strategy, which we introduced in the summer of 2022.

The broad objectives of this were three-fold:

• That residents feel safe in the buildings in which they live
• That residents know how to easily report problems or repairs within their property or in communal areas
• That residents know exactly what to do in the event of a serious incident in the block where they live.

The strategy sets out our approach to meaningful tenant engagement relating to the safety of their homes. The methods to be used are:

• Listen and communicate
• Involve
• Evaluate.

We have noticed historically that our residents were dropping out of traditional methods of engagement, such as scrutiny panels. Typically, it would be the ‘same crowd’. Instead, to meet our future challenges, we needed new, meaningful methods to engage.

A key to this was our creation of a new resident engagement team within APH. As a small provider with limited resources, we made the decision to utilise three existing staff members to fill these roles. These colleagues are already highly experienced in tenancy engagement, having backgrounds in both housing management and debt advice. The team have adopted a number of communication and feedback tools to engage with residents, both traditional (e.g. leaflets/posters), electronic (e.g. website, APH mobile phone app, and our digital notice boards in the high rise) plus, of course, face-to-face. 

An important part of this face-to-face communication is our APH Census. The team is physically knocking on our residents' doors, beginning with the high rise, to undertake the census. This is not only helping us to understand who exactly is living in our properties but any needs that they may have, for example are the PEEPs up do date? Are there any language barriers around building safety that we need to address? Are there outstanding repairs that we can deal with?

The team is also involved in an innovative partnership formed between Tameside Adults Safeguarding Partnership Board (TASPB), Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, Jigsaw Homes Group and ourselves, to help people whose homes were no longer safe because of hoarding. Currently, the partnership knows of 45 cases of hoarding behaviour across Tameside, some of which are within our high-rise blocks. The partnership works alongside those with lived experience of a hoarding disorder to support and assist themselves and others, which of course will also have a knock-on effect of ensuring that our buildings are as safe as they can be.

Additionally, we have an existing method of resident engagement related to repairs - a system used by all colleagues called Every Connection Counts (ECC), whereby any member of staff visiting a property, whether an operative, housing officer or property inspector, fills out an ECC report. This essentially asks the resident if they feel they have outstanding repairs. ECC was originally instigated by APH to help provide evidence in the case of any disrepair claims. However, we have since realised that this is a valuable tool with which to engage with residents on any maintenance issues and to help us provide an excellent repairs service. We also ask our contractors to assist. For example, if an operative notices an issue within a property, then they are asked to report back to us. A good example of this was recently our electrical contractor noticed a dangerous e-bike conversion in a high rise flat, which was immediately reported to our housing team for action. 

As part of our requirement to report Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) we have employed Acuity, who benchmark our performance against other landlords using both Housemark and Acuity data. This data will be used by us to drive improvement as well as to give us further insight into how satisfied tenants are with their homes and the services delivered. The TSM survey will assist us in delivering an effective housing and repairs services that meets the needs of our residents as well as demonstrating APH’s commitment to accountability through communication, monitoring and scrutiny. This in turn will make clear which services are priorities to specific groups of customers, which will help us plan and understand whether our investment in our stock, and our repairs service, is translating to improved customer satisfaction on the ground. For example, we are currently using the feedback that we are receiving from the survey to target service areas that are potentially failing and invest wisely for future improvements. At the moment we have a number of tenants reporting areas of concern to us via the survey, particularly around condensation and mould growth. Of course there is a strong regulatory and media focus on this topic at the moment, and we are using the data received from our residents to plan both reactive and proactive measures to deal with any issues before they become problematic. Some of those reporting issues such as this have traditionally been our tenants who rarely get in touch, so we feel that we have made good progress in being able to make interventions within homes occupied by hard-to-reach residents.

Here at APH we accept that like all providers, we have challenges ahead around repairs, maintenance and building safety, particularly given our size and the age and non-traditional construction of many of our properties. We feel however that by adopting innovative methods to engage with residents, we have made huge advances in defining what an excellent repairs service will look like. We are not only meeting and exceeding our legal requirements but also involving residents, staff and contractors in this process.