4 minute read
Estate Services
ESTATE SERVICES
In April 2019, Greg Nott was recruited to manage the new Estate Services project. In the 12 years he has been with the City he has worked his way up through the ranks, taking on a variety of roles and responsibilities. Starting out as a porter cleaner, Greg moved up to Estate Officer working on a number of the City’s estates, before becoming the first Estate Officer to be promoted into Housing Management.
This varied background has provided Greg with invaluable experience in the delivery of housing services on our estates and has made him particularly well suited to the task of delivering results in the Estate Services Project. Here he gives some background to the scope of Estate Services and reports on some findings from the pilot phase.
So, what are ‘Estate Services’? Well it’s simple really. Estate Services is the collective term for the services tasked with the maintenance of our estates with particular focus on the cleanliness and appearance of communal parts. As you can imagine this is important to our staff and our residents, so we want to make sure we maximising the work done to ensure our estates are the best they can possibly be inside and out.
Background
In 2018, the City of London Housing Division commissioned HouseMark to carry out a review of its housing Estate Services. HouseMark is one of the UK housing sector’s largest membership organisations, providing solutions and opportunities to drive performance improvements. The review focused on cleaning and grounds maintenance carried out on estates and identified current standards. These were then benchmarked against those of other social housing providers. The review also looked at practices used to help maintain high standards. By looking closely at these comparisons, we hoped to highlight any areas in need of improvement.
The review found the standard of City estates to be good in general, with areas mostly clean and tidy, with little anti-social behaviour. However, current practices were found to be dated and inconsistent. Estates were not inspected as thoroughly and often as anticipated. Therefore, standards were not being recorded and evidenced. Resources were not always being used effectively. Inspections were carried out using paper, an inefficient method for record keeping in the digital age. The conclusion was that something needed to be done to resolve these issues and improve the standards.
What we’ve done
First, we needed to establish an appropriate set of standards for our estates to work towards. The standards needed to clear, easy to use and provide greater consistency across all areas. With the help of HouseMark and with information gathered from other social housing providers, we produced a new set of standards, specifically designed for our estates. The standards use clear visual aids and descriptions, accompanied by a grading system. These assist estate staff to understand the expectation for each area and provides the inspector with the tools to carry out a fair assessment. A new digital auditing system was introduced making it easier to fulfil the requirements of our new standards. Staff are now able to carry out mobile inspections without a scrap of paper. The system uses our new set of standards to grade the elements throughout the estate and gives the inspector the ability to evidence their findings as they go along, taking images, notes and creating actions. These can then be filtered through to the estate staff to resolve the issue, potentially before the inspection has concluded. A report is created once the inspection is finished, and this is saved to a central location for analysis. Any actions raised can be monitored to ensure they are carried out to completion.
These automated procedures help the whole process become more effective and efficient for everyone involved. A pilot of the new regime has been ongoing for a few months, with a selection of officers carrying out inspections across a variety of estates. We have been using this time to carefully work with the system and ensure that the inspectors are not only comfortable with using it, but also making sure the system is working the way anticipated, producing reports that can be followed up on effectively, and creating workflows for greater efficiency.
Our aims
As we move forward with the new processes, we hope to provide further transparency for residents by publishing up to date information on how the estates are performing and using the data collected to make further improvements where necessary. We will also be able to closely monitor any health and safety concerns that have been identified and look for patterns that could help us to prevent reoccurring issues in the future.
Feedback from staff and Members has been positive and it is expected that we will continue to show improvements in standards across our estates as we roll the system out to cover all the City’s social housing estates.
If you have any enquiries or general comments regarding the Estate Services, please feel free to contact the team by email: EstateServices@cityoflondon.gov.uk
