The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) recently carried out its routine inspection of Karbon Group, which included Karbon Homes, Leazes Homes and Karbon’s other subsidiary 54North Homes.
It’s part of the RSH’s regular inspection programme to assess how housing associations are performing.
The RSH is an independent organisation that helps to oversee housing associations like ours. Its role is to make sure that we are financially sound, well-governed and making decisions in the right way. It also checks that we’re providing safe, good-quality homes and that we listen to, and involve, tenants in shaping our services.
These inspections are a way for the RSH to make sure housing associations are meeting these important standards, and we wanted to share the outcome with you.
As a Group, we have achieved the highest possible ratings for viability (V1) and governance (G1). This means the RSH is confident that we’re financially strong and well-governed, and that this means we can deliver our strategic and charitable goals.
We’ve also met the consumer standards, with a rating of C2, which is how well we meet the needs and protect the rights of customers, particularly in areas such as safety, repairs and tenant involvement.
We’re pleased that some of our key strengths have been recognised in this area, including:
– Keeping homes and communal areas safe
– Maintaining accurate records of the condition of our homes to guide future investment
– Treating tenants with fairness and respect
– Involving tenants in decision making, including providing a range of opportunities to influence our strategies, policies and services, with effective scrutiny arrangements in place
– Providing a range of relevant and accessible information to tenants, including about our performance
– Clear and compliant complaints handling.
At the same time, we know there are areas where we must do better as a Group, particularly around the timeliness of repairs and deepening our understanding of the diverse needs of tenants.
The RSH acknowledged our focus on strengthening the repairs service and work to involve tenants when planning the improvements.
While the repairs service continues to receive high customer satisfaction overall, and emergency repairs are managed quickly, we know that non-urgent repairs are taking too long. We set ourselves very high standards in this area to ensure customers get the service they rightly expect as quickly as possible. Where we haven’t met these, we’re actively working to enhance our performance.
To help to address this, the Group has already recruited more trade colleagues and sub-contractors. This has meant that the Group was able to complete an additional 6,000 repairs this last year, resulting in shorter wait times and improving our service.
We’re also continuing to enhance our understanding of the diverse needs of tenants across the Group through our ‘Getting to Know You’ project, which was acknowledged by the RSH, and will remain a key focus of over the coming months.
We’ll continue to keep you updated on our improvements, and we hope you’ll start to see the benefits of these improvements soon.