Annual Report to Residents
Welcome to our annual report to residents
for the year April 2022 to March 2023
We work together to create places that people love to come home to.
We work together to create places that people love to come home to.
Great Places
Great Services
Great Business
Great People
In introducing this annual report, first of all our thanks go to the very many residents who have helped us improve our services during the year.
The best way we can achieve our aim of providing a great service is by listening carefully to as many of our tenants as possible. This year has been no exception and we are always looking for new ways of involving our communities in our decision making.
Whether it’s by attending panel meetings, filling in surveys or working with us in our communities, residents have, as always, had a big impact on what we do.
We are delighted to have kept our resident satisfaction levels broadly the same across most areas, at a time when other landlords have been seeing some quite significant drops in satisfaction.
We certainly aren’t complacent in any way. We know from listening to residents that there are still many areas we need to work hard on. There is more information on all of these in this report.
In the past, we have carried out satisfaction surveys annually. This gave us good information, but it meant we had to wait a long time before we could see where changes were making a difference to people. We are now carrying out surveys every three months, so we can change and adapt much more quickly in response to resident views.
Let us know what you think about this report, and about our services – we really would love to hear from you - mail@cornerstonehousing.net
Peter Howard-Williams, Chair & Tom Woodman, Chief Executive
Highlights from 2022/2023
We have reinvested...
Our residents satisfaction is...
We are now completing quarterly surveys on tenant satisfaction using the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures.
We have recieved...
We have completed...
Support provided to you
Financial help through the cost of living crisis
The cost of living crisis has unfortunately meant many households have been feeling worse off and worried about their financial situation.
We supported 20 residents who were in hardship with vouchers for shopping or energy and issued 13 foodbank vouchers.
We continued to work in partnership with HomeMaker Southwest, investing a further £4,500 in direct funding, for them to provide expert advice and guidance to residents who are experiencing debt or financial hardship.
The total financial gain for customers supported by HomeMaker in 2022/23 was £12,631. This included helping them to access welfare benefits they were entitled to but not claiming.
“Really great help”
“Would be happy to be referred again if I have money worries.”
“They were very helpful with showing me how to budget.”
If you are worried about your finances, or experiencing debt, please contact us to discuss the support we can provide.
We continued to support, and work in partnership with, Westcountry Savings and Loans, an ethical community owned, not-for-profit credit union. Over the last 5 years residents have borrowed £12,750 with them and by using the credit union instead of higher cost lenders they saved £30k in interest costs.
Visit www.westcountry.org.uk for more information
Tenancy Support
We provided £2.01m on community investment and financial or tenancy support to residents. This included funding specialist support for people needing help to declutter their homes or gardens.
Our work in your communities
We are proud of our neighbourhoods and we are committed to finding new ways to engage and support our residents. We believe we can always be better connected and work together with residents and community partners to make your neighbourhoods great places to live. Some of the community projects we have been involved in this year include;
Knit and Natter
The local community builder partners in the Countess Wear area continue to hold the “knit and natter” club in the former Cornerstone office at Heneaton Square. We are proud to support this excellent group that provides help to each other on a range of topics. We are always interested to hear your ideas about other ways residents can use the space.
Summerway Skip day
Our Housing officers joined tenants at Summerway for a skip day with Coastal Recycling The day was a great success, helping people to declutter and removing bulky items.
Little Exeter
We donated a selection of items to the creation of Little Exeter. A not-for-profit community initiative based in Exeter City centre.
Easter colouring competition
We held our annual Easter egg colouring competition. Which this year any of our residents who entered received a large easter! The pictures brightened up our Western Way office.
Sponsorship
We sponsored West Exe U11's away kit.
St Thomas Together
We spent the day a St Thomas Together international celebration. We hosted with Co Create Exeter who ran accessible wood working sessions creating bug boxes, and brought some delicious cakes from St Sidwell’s Community Centre to share.
Resolving Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB)
ASB can have a very negative impact on residents, often making them feel unsafe and unhappy in their own home or neighbourhood. We know that reporting it can be a worry for some people and you may feel we can’t do anything to help but we will work with residents and other agencies, like the Police, to try and tackle it. We are proud that 85% of residents who reported ASB to us were satisfied with how we handled it. There are still improvements we can make to our service and we remain committed to doing that.
We received 74 new reports of anti-social behaviour in the year, this includes 16 domestic abuse cases. The most common causes of anti-social behaviour was noise nuisance accounting for 23% of cases. Drug related activity was the cause of 22% of cases opened
“Kept up to date and realistic in outcomes, respectful and great understanding. Managed expectations.”
Safeguarding our residents
There were 49 safeguarding concerns reported in year, this is where someone is worried about the health, safety or wellbeing of a resident they know or have come into contact with.
25 of those our housing officers identified through their engagement with residents, others were reported to us. 42 of those were related to vulnerable adults and 9 involved concerns about children, some involved both.
Our Housing Team made 8 referrals to social work teams, 3 of those were formally investigated and 8 domestic violence referrals were made to the police led multi agency partnership.
Please do get in touch with us if you are ever worried about a resident’s health, safety or wellbeing.
Grounds maintenance and cleaning service
In the year we introduced QR code posters in communal areas which link to a digital survey for residents to give regular feedback on services and to highlight health and safety issues they might spot.
We also created an Estate Champion role for interested resident volunteers to feedback to us about their neighbourhood and review the communal services we provide. You can find more information on that here Estate Champion – Cornerstone Housing.
In 2023/24 we are completing a review of how we deliver these communal area services to ensure we provide great service and value for money.
Hearing your voice
Increased engagement with residents
Every year the Board gets together to reflect and learn from the previous year and plan and prioritise for the coming year. This year they invited our Resident Engagement Panel (REP) to join them so they could hear directly from them about their concerns and priorities. The Board hears a report from the chair of the REP at every Board meeting, which explains the work of the panel, their findings and recommendations for the service reviews they complete. Board members also regularly attend the monthly REP meeting to hear directly from residents.
Customer voice review
The REP completed their review on customer voice, which looked at whether your voices were being listened to and acted upon by Cornerstone. They made some helpful recommendations to us which included looking at ways to increase the membership and diversity of the panel and better monitoring of our performance against customer standard The recommendations are being implemented in 2023/24 and you can read their full review on our website here www.cornerstonehousing.net/customer-voice-review/
Get Involved
Young Resident Engagement Panel
To help us connect better with young people in our communities, we appointed a volunteer youth panel co-ordinator. Their role is to help us engage with young people and to establish a panel to consult with young people on what is important to them.
For more information visit our Residents Engagement Panel website
Mystery Shopper
We introduced mystery shopping in the year, this provides residents the opportunity to give us feedback on their experiences with us, straight after they happen. This might be following a call to report a repair or any engagement you have had with us. If you’re interested in knowing more, please get in touch.
Get Involved
Young Resident Engagement Panel
To help us connect better with young people in our communities, we appointed a volunteer youth panel co-ordinator. Their role is to help us engage with young people and to establish a panel to consult with young people on what is important to them.
For more information visit our Residents Engagement Panel website
Mystery Shopper
We introduced mystery shopping in the year, this provides residents the opportunity to give us feedback on their experiences with us, straight after they happen. This might be following a call to report a repair or any engagement you have had with us. If you’re interested in knowing more, please get in touch.
Learning from complaints
We received 34 complaints and upheld 11 of them, 2 fully and 9 partially. That means we could have done better and we are listening and learning from that valuable feedback.
Complaints received were related to the following areas:
| Maintenance of the home | 8 |
| Staff communication | 7 |
| Other reasons | 6 |
| Lettings | 3 |
| Property condition | 3 |
| ASB case handling | 2 |
| Ground maintenance | 2 |
| Staff performance | 2 |
| Rent | 1 |
| Grand Total | 34 |
What we are doing
Communication features often in complaints, usually where we haven’t kept people updated well enough or not responded when we should have. We will be working hard in 2023/24 to improve this and this includes the introduction of a new IT system to help us log and monitor the contact we have with you.
You can find more information on our website
Complaints quotes
Compliments quotes
Complaint case study
We dealt with a complaint from a customer about mobility scooter storage. We had asked the resident to stop storing and charging their scooter in an internal communal area because this was a health and safety risk but the resident was unhappy about how we dealt with this and wanted somewhere they could store it securely. Whilst we were correct in reinforcing the health and safety aspect we have used this complaint as an opportunity to identify more suitable storage options and we will be producing more guideline for staff in dealing with this kind of resident query.
Responding to your surveys
We ask you to complete surveys when we provide a service to you, for example a repair to your home, we also ask you to complete overall customer satisfaction survey once a year. The results of both of these are reviewed and they help us to improve the services we provide to you, we share some of the results with you in this report.
If you complete a customer survey you will be entered into our £25 monthly prize draw and the £100 prize draw for customers completing the annual survey.
Our Property Services and Housing Management teams have been busy contacting customers this year and following up on the survey comments made in last years Tenant Survey. Here are some of the outcomes;
Repairing and improving your homes
We invested £1.4m in improving customers homes, and our move to component replacements (like kitchens and windows) meant many more residents received an improvement to their home in the year. Resident satisfaction with our repairs service is consistently high showing our commitment to proving a great service to residents. We continued to work responsibly on keeping homes safe, with 100% of required safety checks completed on time.
Healthy Homes
We gathered a lot of useful information from residents who were unfortunately experiencing damp and mould in their homes. To tackle this, we used new monitoring tools, provided training for staff, carried out repairs to homes and worked with residents to tackle the causes. This included providing advice and guidance on managing moisture in their homes and introducing complimentary mould cleaning kits.
Providing homes for those in need
Re-letting our empty homes
We re-let 69 homes in the year, housing over 150 people, including 54 children and 4 victims of domestic abuse. We also helped 2 tenants to downsize to smaller homes as part of our downsizing assistance scheme, this provides practical and financial help to those moving from a larger home to a smaller home. Get in touch with us if you’re thinking about downsizing and need some help.
On average we re-let our empty homes within 16 days, this is 2 days faster than the previous year (not including those that needed major improvements such as a new kitchen). This is important because each day a property is empty we are losing income and someone is waiting to be housed. We achieved this by working well together as team, getting the properties repaired and ready for letting quickly and new tenants assessed and lined up to move in straight away.
Providing homes for those in need
Re-letting our empty homes
We re-let 69 homes in the year, housing over 150 people, including 54 children and 4 victims of domestic abuse. We also helped 2 tenants to downsize to smaller homes as part of our downsizing assistance scheme, this provides practical and financial help to those moving from a larger home to a smaller home. Get in touch with us if you’re thinking about downsizing and need some help.
On average we re-let our empty homes within 16 days, this is 2 days faster than the previous year (not including those that needed major improvements such as a new kitchen). This is important because each day a property is empty we are losing income and someone is waiting to be housed. We achieved this by working well together as team, getting the properties repaired and ready for letting quickly and new tenants assessed and lined up to move in straight away.
Priorities in 2023/24
Here are some of our main priorities:
- Implementation of a new IT system, this will bring with it the ability to better monitor customer contact and complaints and performance against our customer standards.
- Improving the customer experience of our complaints process.
- Reviewing and improving our approach to tackling damp and mould in homes.
- Relaunching our resident engagement panel with further improvements to diversity and better engagement with residents through social media.
- Having a greater presence in our communities through event and projects and responding promptly to neighbourhood and community issues, this includes introducing community surgeries for face to face to contact.
- Relaunching our resident engagement panel with further improvements to diversity and better engagement with residents through social media.
- Having a greater presence in our communities through event and projects and responding promptly to neighbourhood and community issues, this includes introducing community surgeries for face to face to contact.
