Saffron Community Member meeting

Complaints

Our main driver of complaints is mutual exchanges. We have now moved mutual exchanges into the Housing department to streamline the service. We will monitor this to see if things improve.
We hired a second Complaints Officer in September 2023. We will monitor the impact this is having.

This year we really want to grow the work of the Saffron Community Membership (SCM). We want SCMs to be making suggestions for our key objectives for next year (2024-25).
We are working hard to improve our communication with tenants. For example, we have shortened or entirely removed certain admin processes to allow tenants to more easily access the funds made available to them for rent support.

We want to double our investment in our homes and deliver carbon neutral housing – housing that does not add to the world’s carbon emissions – by 2050. This will also reduce the cost of heating homes.
We have increased the average Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) rating for tenants to hit our target of 73%. This rating is a way of comparing the energy performance of homes. A higher rating means the home is more energy efficient.
We have bid for £4.7million in grants over 2 years, for our decarbonisation work, which will allow us to continue updating tenants’ homes with the worst energy performance, in order to make them more efficient and cheaper to run.
We are working with partners to meet increasing temporary housing needs, by selling Clare House in Diss to South Norfolk District Council for example.

Equality Diversity and Inclusion - we had a Communication Accessibility Review take place lead by Professor Dean from the University of East Anglia – who is an expert in accessibility communication. The feedback will be shared with our wider tenant groups as we work through the recommendations.
We are resetting our approach to technology and data – we are working with a new data team who joined Saffron in September to pull everything together and use data to teach us more about our tenants and our homes. We are excited because there is a lot for us to learn. We have introduced a Monthly performance pack which is available on our website on the Performance page by clicking here.
Though a rent cap of 7% was introduced, our costs at Saffron still increased by 14%, so Saffron lost £1.5 million a year. We therefore need to do better for less in the way we run Saffron, and we do not want to make service cuts or cuts to improving homes. Technology and data are important for minimising the effort spent in admin for the organisation.
Saffron Community Membership – we welcome suggestions for how we can make SCM something that has real value, and that people want to be involved in.

The Tenant Scrutiny Group shadowed the Customer Contact Team and schedulers, and met with craftworkers.
The Tenant Communication & Support Group helped to review the next tenant newsletter - Saffron E-News and were involved in the new Service Standards being created.

Tenant groups felt let down in that we had not included them early enough in the service charges decisions to have made a difference.
They are pleased, however, that we are working with an agency called TPAS (tenant engagement experts) to improve how we consult with tenants across the organisation.

Trafalgar House and the Old Fire station, Great Yarmouth focused on improvements to the shared bin stores. The triangle identified that there were security issues at both blocks, which included unauthorised entry. The outcomes included:

- Plans for improved lighting.

- Alterations to the bin compound to prevent fly tipping.

A community triangle took place on 9^th November in Aylsham.
Another Community Triangle took place on 29th November at Ladbroke and Stark close in Diss.

You said: we want more Saffron presence in the neighbourhood. We did: introduced regular Community Triangles.
You said: when repairs are cancelled or follow-ups are needed, tenants do not feel prioritised. Tenants also felt sometimes follow-up jobs were not completed. We did: introduced a new follow-up process as part of a repairs review – tenants requiring further work should get a call within 24 hours of their initial appointment, to specify new date.