Over the last 12 months, we have been a key part of how Stockport Homes has been governed and how it has met its obligations to give tenants and customers a role in scrutinising and reviewing how the company performs and how services can be improved. This is known as ‘co-regulation’.
This Annual Report provides an update on the activities of the Customer Scrutiny Panel covering the period April 2023 - March 2024.
We currently have six members on our panel. In the last year, we appointed one new customer to the panel.
Christine, who had previously been a customer Board Member for nine years, joined the panel in Autumn 2023.
“The CSP does excellent work for Stockport Homes so when the opportunity arrived I became a panel member. My first insight to becoming a member was the welcome and friendliness of the panel.
What I like and enjoy about the CSP is the professionalism also the informality of how the meetings are conducted with everyone being able to contribute no matter how trivial they may feel their contribution is.”
In 2023 the new Chair, Bob was elected by the other members to lead the meetings and providing continued support to the panel.
“During the past 12 months, the Scrutiny Panel have scrutinised the organisations responses to 2 vital service areas which directly affect the lives of customers in their homes. Sadly, the Scrutiny Panel has reduced in size with two of its long standing members leaving in the last 12 months, however, we have gained a new member too. SHG are always looking for customers to get involved and help them improve, so please get in touch if you are interested.
We are greatly looking forward to the planned improvements in Tenant Engagement with the new ASPIRE Panel.”
We come from across the Borough including the Town Centre, Hillgate, Brinnington, Cheadle, and Woodley and we all have an interest in helping our landlord improve its services which ultimately benefits all Stockport Homes customers.
Over the last 12 months, we have received support from an Independent Mentor, Jayne Boote, who assists us when we carry out reviews, making sure we can ask the right questions, get the right information, to have the greatest impact. Jayne has many years of experience working with tenant scrutiny groups and we appreciate her support.
Jayne says “Stockport Homes have always had a commitment that the CSP should have independent support to enable them to undertake effective scrutiny. This commitment has enabled the CSP to choose and scope topics for review, select appropriate scrutiny methods and produce a report independently of Stockport Homes. My role has been to equip the CSP with the tools they need to undertake effective scrutiny reviews”
The Governance and Scrutiny Team at Stockport Homes support us with the arrangements for the Panel.
The biggest part of our work over the last year has been carrying out Service Reviews. This is where we take a detailed look at services and how customers experience those services. Where it is needed, we make recommendations about where we think Stockport Homes should consider making changes or improvements. Some of these will have positive short-term results for customers, others might take longer to lead to changes in how services are delivered.
Once we have completed a Service Review, our report is given to the Service Manager to enable the service to formulate an action plan on how they intend to respond to our recommendations and provide us with a timescale on implementation. We see this part of the process as vital in developing our relationship with the service and allowing us to monitor the changes made. We then report our findings and recommendations directly to the Board of Stockport Homes and the Service Manager informs the Board of the action plan.
Each review provides a great learning process for both the CSP members and for staff at Stockport Homes, and the scrutiny process evolves with each review.
Every year, the CSP aims to complete at least two reviews of Stockport Homes’ services and over the last year, we’ve been to achieve that. The services we reviewed are:
• Safer Neighbourhoods Service – How easy it is for tenants to report anti-social behaviour and how customer expectations are managed with regard to tackling ASB
• Complaints Service - How tenants can make a complaint, how easy this is to do and how effectively customers are communicated with throughout the complaint handling process.
Our first review of the year was the Safer Neighbourhoods Service, who customers engage with when they are experiencing anti-social behaviour. As SHG were about to review its Safer Neighbourhoods policy, we felt that it was a good opportunity to Complement this to examine the service from a customer perspective so that our findings can support the development of a new policy and strategy.
As well as this, ASB case numbers were higher than the sector average since the Covid pandemic and we felt that a review on the service would provide an opportunity to review its effectiveness, in light of the increased numbers.
We focused our review on how easy it is for tenants to report antisocial behaviour, how customer expectations are managed with regard to tackling ASB and how customer satisfaction information is obtained and used to improve services. As part of the review, we undertook a number of activities to help us form judgements about how effective the service was. These included reviewing letters from throughout the customer journey, reviewing information on the website and reviewing tenant satisfaction survey results.
We found that the service is easy to access and is responsive to customer’s needs. There are high levels of satisfaction with the service, quarter 4 data shows that 89% of customers who completed the customer satisfaction survey are satisfied with how their case has been dealt with.
We found that improvements can be made in communicating how the service can respond to and support customers who are experiencing ASB.
We made nine recommendations for changes to the service, which were all accepted by Stockport Homes. These ranged from changes to the website and letters, to improving the way that customer insight is recorded. The action plan from the review can be found at appendix one, which includes each recommendation and the response regarding how they will be addressed, by the service.
Our second review of the year was the Stockport Homes Complaints Service. Over the last few years, the satisfaction levels of how complaints were handled had dropped from 89.4% to 63%. To address this reduction in satisfaction we chose to explore the customer journey through the complaint process to identify any areas requiring improvement.
We identified that the scope for our review would cover how tenants can make a complaint and how easy this is to do, how effectively customers are communicated with throughout the complaint handling process and how customer satisfaction information is obtained and used to improve the service.
To understand how customers use the service and how effective it was, we carried out a number of activities that included customer journey mapping of the complaint service, review of current policy and procedure and discussions with staff on how the service operates.
We found that the complaints service is a responsive service that is easy to access. When complaints are logged there is a clear procedure in place that ensures complaints are responded to in a timely manner. Customers are provided with clear responses that follows an SHG template which is then tailored to the individual need of the customer.
We did however also find that whilst it is easy to report a complaint, we found improvements can be made if a complaint is made to a member of staff who isn’t part of the Customer Feedback team, to ensure that a complaint is taken at first point of contact. There is also currently insufficient customer insight data to inform how the service can improve further.
We made four recommendations for changes to the service, which were all accepted by Stockport Homes. The recommendations included changes to the procedure of how front line staff who aren’t members of the Customer Feedback Service deal with complaints and also to consider a Customer Feedback Team option on the One Number telephone menu. The action plan from the review can be found at appendix two, which includes each recommendation and the response regarding how they will be addressed, by the service
The service reviews are our main area of focus, however we have done many other things over the last 12 months.
In April we were provided with an update on the TSMs and consulted on SHG’s methodology of the survey. We were able to provide our thoughts on how we felt customers would prefer to complete the survey, whether it be in person, via email or text or over the phone.
Also in April, the National Federation of ALMO held their annual conference. They were impressed with our work over the previous year, and as a consequence invited our chair, Bob, to attend the conference in Birmingham to be part of a customer scrutiny question and answer showcase. This was a fantastic opportunity to talk about scrutiny and celebrate the work of the CSP.
Our Chair, Bob was asked to represent SHG at the NFA Tenant Advisory Panel which is a forum for customers to discuss the changes taking place in the housing sector and allow tenants of ALMOs a voice to provide feedback on the changes. It is also an opportunity for tenants to learn from other ALMOs and to help formulate best practice across the sector.
In May, following a number of incidents towards reception staff at Cornerstone, we were consulted on a respect towards staff campaign that SHG wanted to promote to all of its customers. Officers were keen to get a customer’s perspective on what we thought would work well with the campaign and how it should be promoted.
In September we carried out a short piece of work surrounding nonobligatory repairs jobs, which are the repairs that SHG carry out at customers’ homes but are not legally bound to do so. They consulted us to seek our views on whether they should continue to deliver those jobs or not. We were able to provide our views that by no longer completing non-obligatory repairs jobs, more time would be freed for the repairs service to tackle the thousands of much more crucial ‘Work in progress’ repairs that are on standby.
Over the last year, we have continued with the role of the Customer Monitoring Group, which meets three times per year. The role of the group is to monitor performance and other various projects across Stockport Homes and provide feedback to Stockport Council’s Member Committee, which is a meeting between Stockport Homes and Councillors.
In 2024, our structure will be changing as scrutiny arrangements at SHG evolve. Scrutiny exercises by customers at SHG will continue, however this will be led by the new ASPIRE Panel, who are a newly recruited group of customers who will provide assurance to other customers and the SHG Board and will monitor and challenge SHG’s performance to hold them to account. The ASPIRE Panel will commission scrutiny exercises on the areas of SHG that they feel would add most value and any customers can get involved, whether it be on all scrutiny exercises across the year, or just those that they feel passionately about or have an interest in. This will make engaging in scrutiny exercises more accessible to customers.
To find out more about how to get involved and add value to scrutiny exercises, please contact the Customer Engagement Team customer.engagement@stockporthomes.org
We have been proud to be able to work with Stockport Homes to improve the services and experiences of our fellow customers, and grateful for the support of staff at Stockport Homes for helping us in that work. All of our members will continue to be part of scrutiny reviews under the new structure, led by the ASPRE Panel and we hope to be joined by many more customers to help us continue to challenge SHG and help improve services for all customers.