Agenda item

The group considered a Star Survey/Action Plan update report from Sharon Yarde (Housing Customer Experience Lead)

Comments from the Group included; (responses in Italic)

·       Concerns with the way that Customer Service staff were not trained enough in the way that they spoke to the elderly, disabled clients and learning difficulties on the phone and face to face; training would be provided to the Housing Directorate. The Customer Services team who picked up the phones for the whole of the Council were not part of the Housing Directorate team. Customer Services that deal with Housing queries would be included in the course;

·       The recent block inspection letters had only the generic SWT phone number and no Officer contact details which was frustrating when you needed to speak to them direct; This comment was also mentioned by the Tenants Action Group. It has recently been agreed with the Tenant Manager that going forward there would be a name and a photo added to the letters. It had also been suggested that when Estates Officers were on a walk about that they wear SWT tabards to identify who they were;

·       Information was also needed on the Estate walk about with where to find the Officers would be helpful; this would be fed back to the Estates Officers;

·       Information was needed on the website to state which Housing Officer covered which area as at present this was unclear. You need to make them human by putting a bit of a bio about them. This would help communications as the Estate Officers change so often; the website had been updated and the form for ‘contact my housing officer’ now stated the name of your Estate Officer;

·       Concerns that the Estates Officers do not always respond to calls made to them. The structure also needed looking at as staff were constantly being moved around so could not build a rapor with tenants making them feel insecure; since May 2020 we now have our own established Housing Directorate so this should be pretty stable going forward;

·       Training for Estates Officers to deal with complex cases was needed to assist the officers in their role; A training programme would be rolling out soon to all our front line housing staff on domestic abuse as there was new legislation around this and we wanted to make sure that everybody knows what to look out for and everybody knows how to address concerns raised to them. Training would also be undertaken on First Aid and Mental Health issues; As a landlord, why has this training taken so long to happen? Everyone was required to undertake online training which consisted of a core of set modules. Our policies have now been updated to make sure that they were current as legislation changed all the time. As a result of this, more front facing training would be given;

·       More face to face training was required; face to face training would still be given;

The Director of Housing and Communities, James Barrah stated that he would give the group access to the training packages so that they could see and experience what training our staff undertook in modules like Safeguarding so that you were better informed.

An action would also be taken to Customer Services to accelerate work at the front end where calls come through to work with the team that worked on our housing calls and to ask for some better reporting back.

Resolved that  - the report be noted.