The Housing Services Department are there to assist all of our customers and tenants who stay in the Associations 2,664 houses. A 3 year breakdown of our houses is detailed below.

The Team have a number of important tasks, such as rent collection and arrears processing, selecting new tenants for empty homes, making sure our streets, gardens and parks are well looked after, and trying to get encourage people in the community to become more involved with the Association.

The Team had a really busy and challenging year and the following is an overview of the year’s performance.

Empty Houses (Voids)

When someone moves out of one of the Associations houses, the Housing Team aim to get a new family to move into it as quickly as possible. This is the same when the Association builds new houses.

In 2008/09 the Team had 122 empty houses and 266 brand new houses, which they found new tenants for. The turnaround target was 31 days, and a 30 day turnaround was achieved, which was a remarkable improvement of 12 days for the Association. One reason that the Association aims for a quick turnaround time, is so that the Association doesn’t lose too much rent money, which is then invested back into our tenants homes. The Team have a target to keep this void loss below 1.10% and they performed exceptionally well, with void loss only being 0.45%. This was a major area which the Association addressed last year and the introduction of a dedicated technical officer dealing with void properties has been instrumental in achieving this target.

People Wanting Houses (Housing Waiting List)

At March 2008, there were 3014 people on the Association’s Housing Waiting List. The Association is currently working with both North and South Lanarkshire Councils, as well as a number of local Registered Social Landlords in the implementation of the Common Housing Register. Implemented during 2009/10, this will allow a more streamlined approach for applicants, and allow greater access to our homes.

Money for Renting Houses (Rent)

Each year the Board of Management agree the rent increase. This year, an average increase of 4.9% was applied, a reduction of 1%. Within the past year global and national economic factors resulted in growing unemployment and significant upward pressure on household budgets.

The Association recognised that this has had a particular impact on those with limited or modest incomes, including many Association tenants, and as a result the Board of Management agreed to limit the rent increase for 2009/10.

Sometimes tenants don’t pay the Association their rent money in time and the Housing Team spent time trying to make arrangements for payments. In March 2009 the amount of rent money owed was 4% of the total rental income.

Anti Social Behaviour

Sometime the Housing Team have to deal with complaints regarding anti-social behaviour. During the year there were 144 complaints, which the Team assisted with. This is an improvement from last year, and demonstrates the Officers close working with the community.

Evictions

Unfortunately the Association sometimes has to take the serious step of evicting tenants, for a number of reasons, including non-payment of rent and anti-social behaviour. During 2008/09, 9 people abandoned their homes before the Team were able to evict them. The Association will not tolerate any tenant who does not live up to the requirements of their Tenancy Agreement, and will take any actions necessary.

Tidy Gardens and Streets

Throughout the year, the Housing Team also went out to make sure that everyone’s gardens were well looked after and neat and tidy. In addition the Association uses the services of a Landscape Maintenance Contractor who maintains the common pieces of ground within our estates.

Welfare Benefits

The Housing Team have a Welfare Benefits Advisor, who assists tenants to sort out their housing benefit and tax credits. This year, the Welfare Benefits Adviser assisted a total of 220 cases, which was around 18 cases per month, just under the target of 20.

Lots of Clyde Valley tenants receive money from the Government to help pay for their rent. 42% of Clyde Valley tenants get full housing benefit, and 16% of tenants get partial housing benefit. In total Clyde Valley gets 58% of its total rent money from housing benefit.

Tenant Participation

Over the past few months we’ve been working with tenants and the Tenant Participation Advisory Service (TPAS) to review our Tenant Participation Strategy.

The Association has a strong tradition of working in partnership with tenants and responding positively to their changing needs and expectations. Our new Tenant Participation Strategy includes a number of new initiatives that we hope will interest tenants in getting involved.

Some of our new initiatives are summarised below.

Registered Tenant Organisations

– we will continue to support local Registered Tenant Organisations (RTOs) where there is interest amongst local tenants. However we’ve recently supported the setting up of a new Clyde Valley Tenants Association, which covers the whole of North Lanarkshire and South Lanarkshire. Any tenant of Clyde Valley Housing Association can join.

Working Groups

– we’re setting up a number of short-life working groups so that tenants and staff can work together to help us come up with ideas on how we can improve our services. We’ve recently set up the Rent Harmonisation Working Group, which is looking at how we can establish a fair, equitable and transparent way of setting rents across the Association’s entire stock. Over the coming months, we’ll also be setting up working groups on Repairs & Investment, New Build, Estate Management and Customer Care.

Estate Walkabouts

– we’ve been working with TPAS to introduce ‘resident led inspections’. The idea here is that residents in an area, along with Clyde Valley staff and key people from other agencies, will carry out estate walkabouts. These walkabouts will help identify the issues and priorities that need to be tackled within an estate, which can then be included in Local Estate Action Plans (LEAPs). During the next few months, we will be piloting estate walkabouts in Bellsdyke, Douglas, Hillhouse, North Motherwell and Lesmahagow.

Following the success of Clyde Valley Housing Association’s Fun and Information Day held last Summer we decided to follow this up by holding roadshows in Coatbridge and Hamilton for our customers. The roadshows provided another great opportunity for our customers to come along and meet us face to face and also find out what the Association has got planned.

This year the Association also carried out a customer satisfaction survey and the full results are available to view on our website at www.cvha.co.uk. We are currently looking at our action plan in relation to service improvements, as a result of customer feedback and will keep you advised of this.