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    Resident board member

    Our resident board member Christie Finegan ensures that customer voice is heard at the highest level of our organisation.

    She provides input and insight on the strategic direction of Irwell Valley Homes and our current and future priorities as a not-for-profit housing provider.

    At our latest Board meeting in May 2025 key customer-facing items on the agenda included:

    Irwell Valley Homes' annual self-assessment against the Housing Ombudsman's Complaints Handling Code which you can read here.

    Our next Asset Strategy - outlining how we will invest in the condition and sustainability of our homes over the next three years. We are just finalising this document following further input from customers and board members and will share here soon.

    A report on the feedback we have received from customers between April 2024 and March 2025 through the surveys which we issue to each customer after they have received a service from us. You can read the latest performance information about this here.

     

     

     

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    Resident Scrutiny Panel reviews

    Our Resident Scrutiny Panel (RSP) takes a deep dive into different service areas to review what we offer and where and how it can be improve. They also consider any areas of good practice which can be built on or introduced.

    Our most recent service reviews are:

    • Voids and Lettings
    • Accessing and prioritising our services.
    • Anti-social behaviour.
    • Damp and mould.
Irwell Valley Employee showing of his new keys to the property

The RSP review into Voids and Lettings concluded in April 2025 with 24 recommendations and 5 commendations.

Recommendations which are now in progress include:

  • Extending the use of Local Lettings Policies across more buildings and neighbourhoods. These are a set of guidelines specific to that area which our teams will follow when letting homes - helping to ensure that the needs of existing customers are balanced with the need to house those most in need.
  • Enhancing the information that customers receive about their home or prospective new home at every stage - from plans and measurements provided before move-in day to tenancy welcome packs and home user guides. This will help customers to plan for their new home; settle in well and succeed in their tenancy because they have accurate and accessible information available to them.
  • Ensure attention to detail when carrying out works in void homes - for example, removing redundant switches and levers. This should then improve satisfaction when a customer moves in and avoid the need for follow on works early in a tenancy.
  • Taking timely action when there are property condition concerns - including offering support where needed, or enforcement action where appropriate. This is to help keep homes in a good state of repair and ensure value for money.
  • Promotion and education around rightsizing and mutual exchange to help more customers into a home which is suitable for their needs.

You can read the full action plan here.

Irwell Valley Employee showing the resident their ipad

This review concluded in October 2024, with five commendations and 22 recommendations.

Areas highlighted for praise included the range of contact options provided – covering both digital and traditional contact methods, making it inclusive for those who are digitally excluded – and the use of digital noticeboards at high-rise buildings, as a way of sharing ‘live’ messages with targeted groups of customers.

Recommendations, which colleagues across Irwell Valley Homes are now working to deliver, included:

  • Introducing consistent service level agreements – i.e. the time period in which we commit to responding – across all contact channels. This will ensure that customers receive the same standard of service whichever contact method they choose and may also lead to more customers contacting us digitally, freeing up the phone lines for those who need it.

  • Reviewing the opening hours of the Customer Service Team. This has now been completed – with more call centre staff now available between 8am and 5pm. Although the centre now shuts an hour earlier, the allocation of resources better reflects the time of day customers call us. We expect customers to see a reduction in the time they have to wait when they contact us on the phone over the coming weeks.

  • Ongoing promotion of the customer online portal, as a way for customers to manage their home and tenancy at a time to suit them – enhancing convenience and reducing call volumes into the contact centre.

  • Ensuring appointment text messages are issued when an emergency repair is logged. This helps to build a customer’s confidence that the situation is being dealt with, while they wait for an operative to attend.

  • Providing the Customer Service Team with access to the repairs cancellations log. This means they are able to quickly and easily look up this information and provide customers with the reason why the appointment hasn’t been able to go ahead. This provides greater transparency and we hope will help to reduce frustrations with the service.

  • Increase the number of community drop-in and neighbourhood events and communicate these with customers. Increasing our visibility in the areas where we have homes will help to provide a more personal and consistent service, and provides a convenient and accessible way for customers to get in touch.

You can read the full action plan here.

 

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This review concluded in April 2024 with two commendations and 10 recommendations.

These include:

  • Setting up a triage system with a duty officer to ensure reports are reviewed and categorised appropriately. This ensures the most severe and urgent cases are prioritised more quickly and should lead to customers feeling more supported.
  • Allocating named colleagues to a case and ensuring timescales about what customers can expect and when are shared from the outset. These measures help to provide a more personalised and accountable service for customers.
  • Providing further information and access to tools such as noise apps and ‘dear neighbour’ cards to empower customers in reporting and dealing with anti-social behaviour.
  • Completing a review of allocations polices and introducing local lettings policies to help create sustainable communities where both new and existing tenants can thrive, with clear expectations and responsibilities outlined.

You can read the full action plan here.

Window with condensation and dampness

This review concluded in December 2023 with 14 recommendations.

These include:

  • Developing the process to diagnose and understand issues of damp, mould and condensation more effectively and consistently at the point they are reported – leading to quicker response times and more efficient prioritisation for colleagues and customers. This has also included adding an online reporting form, making it quicker and easier for some customers to log their concerns.
  • Providing further training for colleagues to ensure that customers’ personal circumstances and medical conditions (and those of their household) are taken into account when prioritising and planning works. This ensures that those most vulnerable to the effects of damp and mould are prioritised and the impact on their health and wellbeing is reduced.
  • Introducing follow-on checks after a damp or mould job to check on the situation at different stages in the future. This provides reassurance that the problem has been effectively dealt with or provides another opportunity to investigate what is going wrong and how it can resolved. This results in increased satisfaction from customers that they will be supported if the problem reoccurs.
  • Empowering customers with further information and guidance about how to manage condensation and moisture in the home, including through engaging materials like videos and graphics which are easier to digest and implement. We have also reviewed the damp and mould policy to ensure it is accessible and free of any ambiguous words or terms to ensure customers can effectively hold us to account.

You can read the full action plan here.

Policy reviews

Whenever we are due to update or create a policy or procedure which impacts on our customers, we approach our policy review group to gain their feedback.

This helps to ensure the policy is accessible and easy to understand; covers information with is important to customers and provides a chance for issues to be raised from a 'lived expereince' which we might not have considered.

Recent reviews have included:

 

Building Safety Forum

Our Building Safety Forum provided valuable information and insight into the creation of our Resident Engagement Strategies which you can review here.

Their unique input as customers living in our high-rise buildings ensured these documents covered the issues which are important to people there.

In their summer 2025 meeting the group also shared ideas and insight about how we can communicate more effectively with customers about safety issues through our spring and autumn building safety updates.

Ideas included:

- Making it more personal 'your building; your home; your safety'

- Consider a quiz or statistics and figures to help improve understanding of issues.

- Use of video and audio clips to illustrate the sprinkler system alarms and how they work to tackle misconceptions and misunderstanding.

- Put a cost against the price of not getting access to a home to complete a safety check and highlight what this money could have paid for instead.

These will now be taken forward in the autumn updates issued later this year.

Communications Group

Our Communications Group helped us to create our Good Neighbour Toolkit and agreement - launched as part of our Communities Strategy. The aim of this toolkit is to provide a source of information and advice to deal with neighbourly tensions or issues, and stop them deteriorating into bigger issues.

The strategy itself was produced using insight gathered through our Big Customer Conversation roadshow last autumn - a series of focus groups held across our communities to gather information about the priorities of different neighbourhoods.

The Communications Group and RSP also provided feedback on the latest version of our Customer Welcome Pack to ensure it contains useful information and to highlight anything missing. They also checked it was accessible and representative our communities.

You can read this here.

They also reviewed the letters we send out each summer about rent and service charge increases, to ensure they are easy to understand and contain the information customers want to see, and fed back on the design and content of our customer annual report which you can read here.