Winter 2023 Stakeholder News - West Kent Housing Association No images? Click here Winter 2023 A message from Tracy Allison, our CEO Welcome to our winter edition of Stakeholder News, put together especially for our partners. I am pleased to share with you the Regulator for Social Housing has reconfirmed our Governance and Viability rating as G1, V2. We have also recently completed our re-financing exercise, which secured £224m on improved terms and new funding of £175m on innovative terms. This will facilitate quick pricing and routes to market allowing West Kent to respond to more favourable market conditions over the coming years. The current economic climate remains challenging, but we are in good shape to deliver on our plans; to continue to invest in our current homes, the communities where we operate and to build new homes. In 2024 we will start to see the benefit from of our work over the last 18 months to make our services easier to access, and improvements in how we keep customers updated with our progress. Our updated customer portal will play an important part in this and early feedback from our involved residents has been positive. We are working to understand how we can best support more of our customers to book or re-schedule a repair, make a payment or check account balances, among other actions using the portal. We are also working to improve how we respond to complaints. Over the 12 months to June 2023, we managed 460 complaints (a 10% increase to the previous year), of which 76 escalated to the stage two of our process, and seven were reviewed by the Housing Ombudsman. We currently receive 4.6 complaints per 1,000 homes, which mirrors national trends on complaints. We aim to resolve concerns as soon as possible and so we contact all customers who give a low score in our satisfaction surveys to see what we can do to make things right and we have a dedicated customer resolution team to respond to complaints and sharing the learnings with our Heads of Service. We end December achieving an annual handover of 280 new homes, matching the all-time record for West Kent. Check out our update for the regeneration of former garages to provide much needed affordable homes in Swanley. I hope you enjoy the news from around West Kent. Best wishes for the festive season, Tracy Tracy Allison, Chief Executive, West Kent tracy.allison@wkha.org.uk, 01732 749415 Black History Month 2023 – saluting Angela George Angela has over three decades of experience in resident involvement and shared her experiences with us as part of our Black History Month celebrations. Completion of £2.8m redevelopment in Swanley We've completed our redevelopment of 67 old garages across three sites in Swanley, building 14 new West Kent homes in partnership with SME construction firm, Helix. West Kent and Civica welcome students to tech careersFollowing a visit to Orchard Academy in Swanley, two placement students spent a week at Civica’s London hub to learn more about working in a global software business. Youth Apprentices celebrate completion of two-year journey Our two youth apprentices, Esther Esan and Hermoine Hollman both successfully completed their Level 3 Youth Work qualification this September. Beeches scheme hosts successful summer BBQ In the heart of our Beeches community, residents and local people came together for a summer BBQ providing food, community, inclusion and conversation. We're encouraging wildlife in our communities! We've been busy planting new wildlife hedges in Hillingdon Avenue, Sevenoaks in partnership with Sevenoaks Town Council and Trinity School. Your partner newsletterWe'll send this newsletter three times a year. If you don't wish to receive this, please unsubscribe below. |