Good Practice with Housemark

Ashfield Homes has a number of good practice examples listed with HouseMark, a ’not for profit’ organisation which assists housing organisations by enabling them to compare performance against similar organisations. It also undertakes research into areas of good practice within the social housing sector.

Housemark website

Good practice examples

• We produce a regular briefing for staff about latest housing legislation or good practice.
• We have a comprehensive embedded performance management process that tracks performance monthly on a wide range of core business, support service, and customer service standards.
• We are the only Arms Length Management Organisation whose performance is in the upper quartile of 5 of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Key Performance Indicators, and one of only a few housing organisations rated as ’3 Star’ by the Audit Commission.
• Our publication of standards is as comprehensive as the standards themselves.  New

  Service standards are approved by focus groups and forums before they are published.

• There is a positive client contractor partnership which has lead to high levels of customer satisfaction for the refurbishment programme despite the disruption these works can cause.
• We have recently initiated mystery shopping by volunteer ’tenant inspectors’ who report on the politeness and helpfulness of staff.
• We have revised our complaints procedure and complaints form. As well as being more user-friendly, we offer 10p to charity for each form received. We also ask complainants how they felt their complaint was handled.

• Equality and Diversity is at the heart of everything we do as a Company, Ashfield homes has a number of focus groups, forums and consultative techniques aimed at reaching and consulting with tenants in hard to reach groups.  New policies and procedures are discussed within these forums with the aim of making services as accessible as possible.

• We use customer feedback to monitor and improve service.  A number of surveys are sent monitoring services such as responsive repairs, lettings, and Grounds Maintenance to name but a few.  These surveys have identified areas for improvement which have then been addressed resulting in a significant improvement in customer satisfaction levels.

• We continually monitor Rent arrears.  As part of this continual process rent arrears are analysed on a weekly basis by area.  Targets are set and where arrears are over target they are monitored closely and action is planned to try and reduce arrears.  Further to this district wide analysis AHL, also sets targets by individual areas and by Rent Officer.  These targets are monitored by the Manager on a weekly basis. 

• Every tenant’s home is visited by a specialist qualified engineer who will complete by appointment a full Property Health and Safety Check / Service.  This Service ensures all statutory health and safety checks / services are completed where possible in one visit.  The Property Health and Safety Check / Service includes:

  • Gas Service/Safety Check (if applicable)
  • Solid Fuel Service/Safety Check (if applicable)
  • Smoke Alarm Service/Test
  • A Safety Check of any Gas Installation Pipework (e.g. pipework to a cooker)

  The annual Property Health and Safety Check / Service is undertaken between the months of April and November.  The time period has been set to reduce the risk of tenants being without heating or hot water because appliances will have been serviced during the summer months and there will be less chance of them breaking down over the winter period.