Tenant Satisfaction Measures – Annual Performance

These questions were only asked to our rented customers.

An important part of providing the affordable and comfortable homes we promise is to deliver a reliable and cost-effective repairs and maintenance service. We have done lots of work to improve this, including:

• Reviewing and making improvements to our processes for preventing, and resolving damp and mould
• We replaced 204 kitchens, 185 bathrooms, 317 boilers and 213 roofs – along with lots of other components
• We have continued to recruit to our inhouse maintenance service through the year, including the electrical services team, void team ( empty homes), and surveying services and, in April 2024, our kitchen and bathroom replacement team went live. We hope you will notice a difference and that this will be reflected in our 24/25 results.

These TSMs statistics show how we are doing with our repairs

We are committed to maintaining safe homes. Our final TSMs figures show this;

We take your safety very seriously and this can be seen in our commitment to carrying out all the safety checks we need to; and something more. Over the last year we have set up a Building Safety Group, made up of residents from our high-rise blocks, and a number of staff from our compliance, housing and health and safety teams.

First on its agenda was to work on a Building Safety Residents Engagement Strategy template which is going out for wider consultation to customers in a number of the high-rise blocks. We will then make sure every person over 16 years of age who lives in these blocks receives one, before repeating this process on other high-rise blocks.

We also asked an extra question here:

How strongly would you agree or disagree with the following statement, “I trust bpha to do what they say they will do?”. 55% agreed with this.

We want this to be much higher. In May 2024 we finished our recruitment for our customer Service Improvement Panel, we have 10 customers who will be part of the ongoing customer voice at bpha. This group will sit alongside our customer experience committee and provide customer scrutiny over what our Board sees.

Our new Customer strategy was written early in 2024 and will be reviewed next year. Usually this would cover a longer period but with so many changes in the economy and political landscape including regulation we want to make sure our strategy stays current.

In April 2023 the new complaints resolution team was set up; over the year the team managed 734 complaints; 675 where submitted as part of the TSM data collection (some were excluded due to the Regulator for Social Housing’s technical requirements). We implemented a promises part to our process which means if we can’t resolve the complaint within the Ombudsman’s timescales (such as complete a repair) the team will monitor and check in with you afterwards to make sure it has all been completed to your satisfaction.

We use our online engagement page, The Place, to ask you about our services. We really want to get more people involved in this page as we want to hear from as many customers as possible. You can sign up to help design our services here.

And to help ensure we listen, understand and act on what you tell us, we have continued to make sure our staff receive empathy training.

How we respond to complaints is a top priority and one of the reasons we set up the Complaints Resolution Team.

There is a lot of work to be done, but we have made some improvements:

• We have updated our systems to improve our handling of complaints. You can find out more information here
• Our new policy is written to make sure we meet the new Housing Ombudsman complaint handling code; and we will shortly be publishing our first annual complaint handling report
• Some respondents who said they were dissatisfied with the handling of complaints haven’t had a formal complaint logged with us, so we will make sure all our colleagues know what to do when someone wants to complain. We are providing on-going training for the Complaints Team and new training for all customer facing staff. We want anyone you talk to, to have the skills to make sure your complaint is logged and then we can work together to try to come to the best resolution for you. There is more information about what is and isn’t a complaint here.

• We have recently updated our anti-social behaviour policy; we no longer use the term unwelcome behaviour, and the way we deal with noise complaints is being updated.
• We have been using a Noise App to make reporting noise easier and working closely with other agencies around responsibilities for resolving noise disturbances.
• During last year we opened Café Connect in Queens Park and community hubs in Kingsbrook and Cauldwell areas, Bedford and Trumpington, Cambridge
• We know things didn’t start well with Just Ask our grounds maintenance contractor, but we have been working closely with them to make sure your communal areas do feel well maintained
• In some blocks of flats, we are not responsible for the cleaning and maintenance; if you live in one of these blocks let us know if something isn’t quite right so we can work with the management agent to make improvements to the services you receive.

These are just a few examples of how we focussed on improving services last year; we are continually looking at ways we can get better. We’ll be issuing more information about how we are performing and plans for what we are going to do with the TSM data later in 2024.

You can see all our results, and the breakdown between rented and shared ownership customers here.

The Regulator has asked housing providers to report TSM results every year at the end of March. But a lot can happen in a year, so in addition to our annual results, we’ve decided to publish your feedback on a rolling basis, publishing new results and how we’re acting on the feedback regularly both here, and in every edition of Talk, your bpha customer magazine.

If you have any questions about Tenant Satisfaction Measures or our published results, please contact us.