We’ve got some plans in place to make sure that we’re improving your customer experience, whether that’s about your neighbourhood, repairs or how we communicate with you. You’ll see some changes this year and if you want to get involved in shaping some of those, take a look at our ‘your voice, your home’ page for opportunities.
Communication
Being listened to and keeping people informed
You told us that we need to do a better job of keeping you informed – whether that’s about letting you know what’s happening with your repairs or keeping you in the loop with any plans or changes and being transparent about those.
To keep you in the loop with what’s going on, we’ve introduced a page on our website to let you know how we’re doing with everything from repairs and safety, to sustainability and complaints. We’ve also started sending out our quarterly newsletter to all customers so we can keep you up to date with any changes, news or opportunities to get involved.
And speaking of getting involved, we’ve made some big changes to how we engage with you and make sure we hear what you’ve got to say about how we do things. We want to make sure you can really make a difference, and that’s why we’ve introduced our Customer Insight Committee, the Review Crew, our Community Champions and Diversity Counts groups. These groups help us to co-design services, shape policies and help to generate practical ideas to help us do things better.
If this sounds good to you but you just want to dip your toe in, then you can join over 1,000 other customers in our Your Voice Matters group and get involved as and when suits you.
We’ve made some improvements on making sure that you can get the information you need in a way that works this year too, and have introduced an accessibility toolbar on our website. This means that anyone visiting our website can translate information into their preferred language, have text read aloud or change font sizes and colours to suit.
For customers who’ve been having sustainability upgrades, we’ve introduced event days and customer care packs to help on their journey so everything is clear from the beginning.
But, let’s look to the future.
Where you told us we did get it right, it was when we kept you up to date with what was happening and when it was happening with your repair and our new customer portal will mean you can know exactly that. We’ll be introducing this in the next year.
You’ll also see us out and about in your communities more as we focus on making improvements that work for your local community and are important to you in your neighbourhood. We’re working with our community champion volunteers to help us do this. We’ll then be developing a local action plan of things you’d like to see – from developing green spaces to tackling issues like loneliness. More on this in our neighbourhoods section.
There’ll be more events you can attend, too – both virtual and in person. Some of our upcoming events include our Review Crew taking a closer look at antisocial behaviour and how we respond to it, communi-tea events out and about and launching our social clubs for relaxed online social sessions to help tackle isolation. We’ve also started hosting quarterly online summits for you to attend to help explore challenges together with our colleagues, learn more about what happens behind the scenes here and co-create solutions for the year ahead. Keep up to date on the next summit on our social clubs webpage.
You’ll also hear from us over text or email soon. We’ll be asking you to complete a customer census so you can let us know more about you and what communication preferences you have so that we can improve how we communicate with you.
And finally, we’ll be introducing surveys after you’ve reported antisocial behaviour to us. We already do these after repairs, complaints and if you’ve just moved in for example so that we can get your feedback on specific services as soon as you’ve had them.
Neighbourhoods
When we asked if you were satisfied with how we contribute to your neighbourhood, only 53% of you said you were satisfied or fairly satisfied with what we do. You told us that you don’t see enough of us out and about in your community. You also told us that some of the general neighbourhood conditions weren’t up to scratch and you were frustrated about antisocial behaviour.
Where we did get it right, community facilities and events were mentioned as well as where there were tidy streets, maintained gardens and clean communal areas. Our challenge is to make sure we’re doing the right things in the right places, which is where our place plans come in – more on that below!
Some recent walkabouts have resulted in some positive changes for communities – from greenhouses being installed in Huddersfield to bin store issues getting sorted in Leeds, and parking solutions being found in York and some neighbourhood benches put in Barnsley.
Our antisocial behaviour team have been busy too, working on 1,814 cases and getting 36 court orders granted. 23 of these included injunctions, which means the perpetrator is legally directed to either do something or stop doing something, making a huge difference to those living nearby. We also had eight cases result in evictions.
And, some improvements we’ve got planned
Our grounds maintenance team will be introducing a new landscaping upgrade team, they’ve also revamped our tree programme and we’ve been piloting a cut and mulch approach to grass cutting to help increase overall biodiversity and reduce our carbon footprint. Did you know that since April 2025 we’ve invested almost £30,000 in making our green spaces better?
We’ll be running quarterly Big Days Out – these are events out in your community. In August we had 60 colleagues out and about across Yorkshire helping with community clean ups, fixing repairs on the fly and holding smaller community events. Our future events will include local activities to benefit communities, like litter picking, gardening and improving green spaces.
The place plans will be rolled out to a further eight places, covering all our homes and neighbourhoods across Yorkshire.
We’ll also be reintroducing housing officers and housing managers so you can have more visibility of our colleagues where you live – something you’ve been asking us to do for a while. The colleagues you see will know more about your local area and will be able to respond more effectively to different needs in your community, with more general roles.
Repairs
When we asked how satisfied you were with our repairs service, 70% were fairly or very satisfied. But when it came to the satisfaction with the time taken to complete your repair that dropped to 64%. We know that our repairs service is one of the most important things to you and we know that when it goes wrong, it causes frustration. The good news is that when we get our repairs right first time, you told us you’re really happy with our service. So, we’re focused on making sure this is the experience we give more often.
Some of the feedback about where we can improve was around our communication for repairs. Another area you said we could improve on was with our contractors and the quality of service they provide so we’re also working on an action plan to improve this.
Here’s what we’ve done
Over this past year we’ve seen the number of repairs you’ve reported go up by 18% compared to the year before, so they’ve been taking us longer than we’d like to get sorted. We completed 17% more repairs than the year before by increasing the size of our repairs team, adding around 340 more repairs a week.
We’ve also improved our processes and policies so we could get repairs fixed more quickly. And to help us get your repairs sorted as quickly as possible we also brought in our partners, Plentific, who fixed over 2,000 repairs in six months.
With demand and costs increasing, we now track our repairs performance more closely. This means we can step in when things aren’t going as they should and make sure that we’re getting to the oldest appointments first to help reduce wait times.
Of course, there’s more to do, so here’s what we’ve got planned
We’ll be introducing a new system to help us schedule repairs in a better way, and so you get better updates on what’s going on. It’ll give our teams more information so they know what’s going on before they turn up at your door and can get more jobs sorted first time.
For you, our new customer portal will mean you can log in and check what’s going on with most enquiries you have open with us. The portal will continue to develop too so over time you’ll be able to do more on it like change your direct debit date or book some simple repairs. This functionality won’t happen overnight, but is where we’d like to head and we’ll be working with customers to help pilot different options.
We’ll also be doing some work behind the scenes so that when you report a repair you’ll get an appointment time booked in and confirmed there and then. This is another feature for the future, likely in early 2026, but where we’re headed. We’ll be upping the quality of our work too by introducing a framework for our colleagues to follow, making sure repairs are carried out to our expected standards across the board.
We don’t just want to fix things when they go wrong though, we’re going to join up with our assets team so that common repairs can be scheduled into our planned improvement work. So, while we’re upgrading your kitchen for example we’ll also check on some typical repairs that we know might need sorting around that time so that you don’t have to call us out again.
Where next?
Use these quick links to the side to explore more of the Tenant Satisfaction Measures or head back to the customer homepage.