Message from Allison Hodgson, Head of Housing Management at YHN

In YHN, we review the way we deliver our services to make sure that we are meeting our customers’ needs and providing value for money.  Over the last year, we have been looking at our housing management service and thinking about new ways of working that can help us to deliver excellent services consistently across the city.

At the moment, the housing management service is provided from ten Community Housing Offices and four Customer Service Centres.  The services provided are quite varied, and include managing estates, enforcing tenancy agreements (such as dealing with anti-social behaviour and missed rent payments) managing and letting empty properties, working in partnership with other agencies and supporting tenants’ and residents’ groups.

Through the review process, we invited customers to focus groups so we could find out what was important to them.  They told us that they would rather deal with the same officer every time they have an enquiry.  To respond to this, we are looking to increase the number of housing officers we have, giving them fewer properties to manage so they will be able to carry out a full range of duties on their patch themselves. 

We also know that many customers now prefer to contact us by telephone so we are planning to introduce a dedicated Customer Service team who will answer telephone calls and see customers who come into our offices. 

The number of customers visiting our offices is reducing and at four of our offices, numbers are so low that we need to consider their long term future.  To respond to this, we are considering moving out of three of our offices and providing the service from one of our existing offices near by.   This will affect the Fenham, Newbiggin Hall and Throckley offices, all of which only open now on a part time basis.  This will free up officer time to spend more time managing estates which is something that customers told us was a priority.    

We are also thinking about delivering a housing management service from our city centre location at Your Choice Homes so that customers have more choice of where to go.  

We know that we perform well compared to other housing organisations across the country, but we also know that we need to get better at the way we deal with complaints of anti social behaviour at a local level.  We also know that we need to work closely with our partners in the council who are responsible for cleaning up on our estates and managing grassed and planted areas.  We will be doing more work on this later in the year.  
 
We still have some work to do which will include speaking to customers who will be directly affected by these proposals. I am keen to hear your views so please get in touch if you have something to say.

Allison Hodgson
Head of Housing Management
0191 278 8600
allison.hodgson@yhn.org.uk