Estate Services standards
Tenants have been telling us that you would like more information about the services we provide to you.
Some tenants will receive a grounds maintenance service from us, which is paid for through your service charge. This service maintains any external communal areas that are shared by tenants.
We have produced some service standards with more information about what we will do when we visit. We will display these standards in communal areas and on the website over the coming months. This will also give you information about how often we visit where you live.
We would like to thank the tenants who worked with us on the draft standards. The feedback and discussion really helped shape the standards, with a focus on what you felt was important from the service.
We are doing a similar exercise with our cleaning standards. We will be sharing the standards with you over the coming months, alongside some new ways for you to give us feedback about the standards to help us improve.
Complaints update
We continue to receive a consistent level of formal complaints. The main reason for complaints is repairs. This is not surprising as repairs are the service we carry out the most and the main reason our tenants contact us. The number of complaints we receive is approximately 2% of the number of repairs we carry out each month.
We know we need to improve our performance on responding to formal complaints in the published timescales, and we appreciate your patience while we work to improve in this area.
Opportunities to learn
Complaints are an opportunity for us to learn about how we can improve our service. Some of the learnings we have identified in January-March this year include:
- Monitoring follow-up actions If actions identified from a stage 1 complaint cannot be resolved straight away, we now record and report them to our Leadership team on a regular basis, to monitor them and ensure they are completed in the agreed timescales.
- Repairs We need to improve our text and email communication to tenants, so they identify the repair we are visiting to carry out.
- Fire safety After a complaint about the high number of false alarms in a block of flats from the fire detection, we identified that changing the heads of the smoke detectors would reduce the number of false alarms.
We are presenting an overview about our complaints performance to the Tenants Assurance Panel in May to hear how we can improve.
The Housing Ombudsman service is available to help tenants at any time during the complaint process. You can contact them at:
Tel. 0300 111 3000
Housing Ombudsman Service, PO Box 152, Liverpool, L33 7WQ