Housing Annual Report April 2022- April 2023

This is the first Annual Report I've had the pleasure of writing an introduction to.

You'll see that this report summarises the Council's performance and key projects that staff have been working on to support out tenants from April 2022 to March 2023. It focuses on the development of the Council's performance since last year and celebrates our key achievements which include:

• We achieved TPAS Exemplar Accreditation in 2022/23, one of only three social housing providers to do so. Tpas are an organisation dedicated to improving tenant engagement standards across the country. This accreditation recognises our long-term success and commitment to tenant engagement as a landlord.
• We launched our refreshed Tenant Engagement Framework 2022-25
• We have implemented the Damp, Mount and Condensation Policy with a zero-tolerance approach. The performance for responding to and dealing with damp and mould has significantly improved following implementation of the Policy.
• We organised and attended drop-in sessions at all of our District Heating locations and met with tenants to discuss prices rises, how they would be affected and the help we could provide to mitigate these changes and offer other cost of living support.
• The Homelessness Prevention and Rough Sleeper Strategy 2023-2026 was revised, approved and published in March 2023.
• We have contracted 42 homes as part of the Laughton Gate development in Throapham, our largest acquisition to date. These homes will be delivered over multiple years.

It was however a challenging year for the Council and many of our tenants, The cost of living crisis alongside other national issues affected the services we provided and highlighted across the areas that we need to improve on.

Further to this, the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023 has introduced reforms to increase accountability and regulations across the Social Housing sector with new consumer standards which will cover a range of issues including health and safety, compliance, landlord transparency, and tenant engagement.

So, looking forward to 2023/24 work is therefore underway to make sure that staff across the Council have a thorough understanding of the regulations and the Housing Service must be prepared to be inspected at any point from April 2024.

I hope that you enjoy reading the information in the report and if you want more detail or have questions on any particular aspect, don't hesitate to contact us.

Yours sincerely,

Councillor Sarah Allen

Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Housing and Neighbourhood Working