Peter Fitzhenry is managing director of Golden Gates Housing Trust.
The introduction of the bedroom tax and universal credit as components of the government’s welfare reform programme, for which Warrington was a Pathfinder, was widely predicted to increase rent arrears and voids, leading to substantial losses in revenue for Golden Gates Housing Trust. The housing provider’s managing director, Peter Fitzhenry, takes us through what it has done to respond to these issues by introducing better neighbourhood working and resident engagement at a time when it is most needed, and the significant benefits gained.
We decided that more face-to-face contact with our tenants was needed to help them with problems arising from the welfare reforms. A team of 28 people was re-structured from functional teams to one where each officer would be responsible for a geographic patch in the town, and be field- rather than office-based.
Our neighbourhood officers provide a broad range of services for tenants, going beyond the role of a conventional housing officer, and deal with:
- Low level anti-social behaviour;
- Untidy gardens, land issues & trees;
- Rent arrears;
- Liaising with tenants regarding property improvement works;
- Offering support to those affected by the benefit changes, in particular universal credit;
- Property viewing and new tenant sign-ups;
- Dealing with tenancy and estate management;
- Support for numeracy and literacy issues to tenants who need it.
The neighbourhood offices are the main point of contact for tenants and the interface between the tenant and Golden Gates’ services.
The changes meant that we had to roll out a new IT system to give the neighbourhood officers access to all the data they need while out in the field and which traditionally they would have had to come into the office to download. The new approach allows our staff to work closer with our tenants and to build stronger relationships with them. We can get a better idea of their circumstances and use this information to help tackle issues linked to health, financial difficulties, unemployment and digital exclusion.
The team is completely paperless, using iPads configured with Housing Support Pro software from Footprint Solutions. The software was configured to automate our new service forms to provide a quick and structured means of collecting information.
Neighbourhood officers can now provide several services in one visit to a tenant’s home and spend more time on their specific patch. It also allows them to spend more time supporting and safeguarding our most vulnerable tenants and their families.
When meeting a tenant, the officer can call down any of the 40+ iForms which are already pre-populated with key reference data. The iForms are completed using keyboard, hand-writing or voice, with the latter two being automatically converted to text. Fields on the iForm can be designated as mandatory to ensure the officer collects the minimum dataset to facilitate resulting processes. Tenant and officer signatures can be captured, photos can be taken and/or documents scanned, card payments collected, repairs arranged and central records updated, in real time direct from their iPads.
Our neighbourhood officers have also embraced social media, with many taking to Twitter; 10 of the team are actively using the social media site to tweet about specific issues and events which are taking place in their local patch, allowing tenants to keep up to date with what’s going on and get instant feedback from their neighbourhood officer.
Because we needed to deliver the system from scratch very quickly, an agile approach to development and delivery was adopted. The first phase of the system was designed, developed and implemented in four months.
A year after the embryonic system was implemented, very significant benefits have been achieved with cashable benefits in excess of £1 million.
During this past year, we realised that the technology adopted for our neighbourhoods system was also applicable to other parts of the business so more iForms have been developed and the number of users has more than doubled.
Once the first phase of the system had been completed, Footprint Solutions identified a possible market for it and they decided to rebrand it as the Housing Support Pro app which has since been launched to the wider social housing sector.
One further development has been the release by Footprint Solutions of Works Connect, a complete repairs handling system, from the receipt of repairs requests through to final accounting. We have already implemented the system to handle the management and scheduling of repairs for the voids team; this will soon be extended to our planned and cyclical maintenance work and, in due course, to responsive repairs.
Finally, in recognition of the time it takes to go through the procurement process, and because we needed to go through the EU tender process anyway as costs were escalating as the system was being extended across the organisation, we decided to tender for a Framework Agreement, giving all social housing providers and local authorities ready access to the Housing Support Pro system and associated software and services.
Peter Fitzhenry is managing director of Golden Gates Housing Trust.
