About our Housing service standards
We aim to continually deliver quality value for money services that provide a consistently high standard of service to all residents. Set out below are our housing service standards and what you can expect from us as a tenant, leaseholder or housing applicant.
The service standards are set out under each of the headings used in the Annual Report for tenants and leaseholders which is published in autumn of each year and is written with the help of our council residents:
- Tenancy – including rents, allocations and tenure
- Neighbourhood and community – including preventing and tackling Anti-social Behaviour (ASB), local area cooperation and neighbourhood management
- Resident involvement – including customer services, complaints, and understanding and responding to diverse needs
- Home - including housing advice and homelessness, quality of accommodation and repairs and maintenance
- Value for money – demonstrating that we are providing cost effective and efficient services
The service standards also provide you with information on what the Housing and Regeneration Department monitors and reports on performance to ensure that we are meeting these standards.
For key areas of activity we will have a set of housing 'Key Performance Indicators' (KPIs) so our performance can be monitored. These will be reported and published quarterly with an explanation where performance has not met target. We will also report performance against these key indicators to residents via the Area Housing Panels.
Throughout the service standards, ‘council residents’ means council tenants and leaseholders including those residents living in housing managed on behalf of the Council by Resident Management Organisations or Co-operatives.
Service delivery for all
We are committed to the active promotion of equal opportunities in the provision of our services to the community. Where we need to, we will adapt our services to ensure we are meeting our Customer Promise.
To ensure that we are providing services on an equitable basis to all sections of the community we will:
- Provide a specified standard of service and ensure that this is provided on a fair basis
- Ensure that no individual in the community is discriminated against on grounds of race, gender, nationality, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religion or belief, disability or age
- Monitor the number of properties where major disability adaptations have been completed and maintain our property records so we can identify adapted properties when they come up for letting
- Provide services in line with current policy and according to our legal responsibilities
- Enforce the relevant tenancy and lease conditions to ensure that council residents are protected from harassment and provide advice and assistance to others experiencing harassment
- Ensure that employees and service users treat each other with respect and train our employees in diversity to ensure we are providing the highest possible standards of customer care
- Train our staff so they can identify matters that need to be reported where there are adult or children safeguarding concerns identified
- Provide annual information and analysis on equalities monitoring and publish this on our web pages
- Record resident’s disability or communication needs to enable the Council to tailor our service to your needs
- Ensure that offices comply with legal requirements for disabled access
- Ensure that all publications are available to download or order in standard or alternative formats
You can also read about our customer promise and what to do if our service standards are not met.