About the Inspection

What the Inspectors found

How you got involved

Further information

The Audit Commission carried out a Short Notice Inspection in August 2009 of two of the services we provide:

1. Aids and Adaptations: How we provide aids and adaptations to make it easier and safer for residents with disabilities or impairments to live in their homes
2. Resident Involvement: Our arrangements for involving residents in influencing our services, decisions and policy making and monitoring our performance.

The inspection also looked at three wider areas:

1. Access and Customer Care: The quality of our customer service and how easy it is for customers to use our services.
2. Diversity: How we make sure that services are accessible and a good service is provided to customers, regardless of their age, gender, ethnic origin, disability, sexuality or religion.
3. Value for Money: How we provide a quality service that is cost effective, including how we manage efficiency savings, compare our services and their cost against other housing providers and set our budgets.

Short Notice Inspections check the quality of services being delivered to customers and encourage housing associations to improve them.

The inspectors used a range of methods to assess our services, including interviews and focus groups with residents, Board Members and staff, as well as telephone calls with residents and visits to some of our offices.

We would like to thank all residents who were involved in the inspection and gave the inspectors their views.

What the inspectors found

For the past 18 months or so we have been listening hard to what our customers have said are their priorities for improving our services.

We have taken action. We have made lots of changes to what we do and how we do things. This process is continuing and we’re confident it will lead to better services in the areas that are most important to our customers. Giving a great service is very important to us. In fact, it’s our top business plan priority.

We know that everyone’s been feeling the pinch even more this year, so we’ve been particularly keen to try and make changes in areas where we can save money without reducing the quality of service we provide. We’ve been able to invest more money in residents' priorities such as aids and adaptations and increasing our resident involvement work.

We are pleased the inspectors found that we have a strong approach to supporting residents with disabilities and impairments to live in safe and accessible homes and that we’re good at delivering value for money.

We are also pleased the inspectors found our overall approach to resident involvement to be satisfactory. We agree with inspectors that there is still more we can do to improve access to services and information and to meet the diverse needs of residents. We’re determined to make further improvements in these and other service areas.

Click the following link to read a full list of the Inspectors' recommendations (opens in a new window): Inspectors recommendations

How you got involved

We needed to prepare an action plan showing what we will do in response to the Inspectors' recommendations. We were really keen to have your help to put this together. We had to get the action plan to the Audit Commission by 30 November, so time was short. We drew up a draft action plan which you can see by clicking the image on the left of the page.

There are lots of ways you helped to shape the action plan:

• Completed the survey online, over the phone or at your local office.

Entries received by midnight on Wednesday 18 November 2009 were entered in to a free prize draw to win two cash prizes of £250. Any surveys completed after this date were used but not be eligible for the prize draw.

• Went to one of four 'teleconferences':

• We also: 

Further information
 

The Audit Commission’s reports and other documents can be viewed by clicking the images to the left of this page.

Click the following link to view the Audit Commission's website (opens in a new window): Audit Commission