No buts...

What’s your resolution?

Get a grip on efficiency

Who’s doing it well?

Mosaic Homes, North and East London and Essex

This super-trim association slashed its spending by £400,000 between 2003 and 2004 and is expecting to cut another £400,000 this year

Why should you copy them?

Two years ago, Mosaic Homes’ chief executive Brendan Sarsfield made it his new year’s resolution to tighten up spending at the organisation (then called New Islington & Hackney Housing Association). He hasn’t looked back since. Since January 2002,

his fearless overhaul of salaries and working methods has saved hundreds of thousands of pounds. The association estimates that its spending fell by £400,000 from 2003 to 2004.

Sarsfield is the first to admit that his waste-busting crusade hasn’t been easy. “It’s been painful but it’s about having the mentality that you can do it. You can lose a number of posts – if there’s the will to do it,” he says. The landlord cut 20 management and non-frontline jobs from the 600-strong finance, information technology and human resources departments.

Next, Sarsfield reduced wasted time and resources by addressing what he refers to as “job creep”. “It’s very easy to allow people to keep extending what their work involves, so we took a close look at what everyone was doing and told people ‘this is part of your job; this isn’t’.” Now each person gets a monthly bundle of information and requests for unnecessary information may be refused. For example, Sarsfield says, a housing officer might not need a breakdown by age of those in arrears. This has stopped a large amount of unnecessary printing and demands on colleagues.

The war on superfluous paperwork wasn’t confined in-house. Contractors now receive one monthly invoice, not a constant stream of documents, and all of Mosaic’s electricity needs are met by a single supplier. In October, the landlord’s entire repairs system was outsourced, including the call centre, which will save another £200,000 next year.

But the largest ongoing savings have been made by buying out the contracts of staff who had transferred from council housing departments. Staff were offered a cash payment in return for accepting performance-related contracts rather than ones that increased automatically each year. It was voluntary, but of 400 offered the deal, only two rejected it. “It cost quite a bit but it was worth it because salary is a big part of our budget,” Sarsfield says.

Salaries are now benchmarked against the going rate in a relevant sector rather than rising according to a pre-determined scale. Staff get performance-related bonuses for meeting budget targets and for good results in customer satisfaction surveys. Office overheads have also been reduced by making frontline staff share desks and go out to visit tenants more.

But Mosaic says cost-cutting hasn’t taken place at the expense of local services. In 2004, rent arrears fell by 4%, the association took on 20 more floating support staff and won an award for an initiative in which all staff spent a day visiting tenants in their home. The next stage will be what Sarsfield calls “the softer stuff” – training, for instance. “We have made a lot of the structural changes. The next question to ask will be, how can the people we have achieve even more?”

What’s your resolution?

Improve tenant participation

Who’s doing it well?

Bromford Housing Group, West Midlands

Tenants of Bromford are invited to spend a day with staff to see how they work. They benefit from being better informed when they take part in consultation groups

Why should you copy them?

Many associations consult tenants on everything from repairs to community projects but Bromford Housing Group has gone one better. It has made sure tenants not only have the opportunity to speak up, but that they have the knowledge, skills and confidence to really influence the way services are run.

Since September 2004, the association has been organising “experience it” days, on which tenants can visit offices and estates to find out more about what staff actually do. “We are equipping them with a more rounded picture of what we’re about so when we’re discussing things, they know where we’re coming from,” explains Paul Taylor, business development manager at the association. “You can’t expect a client to comment on estate management policy having never worked with an estate manager.”

It’s not only about meeting local housing officers – volunteers get an insight into many departments usually hidden from their view. The first day kicked off at Bromford’s head office and included tours of IT and finance departments and the call centre. Most of the tenant volunteers lived on Bromford’s less deprived estates, so one of the most useful parts of the day was showing them the work associated with maintaining the more challenging ones.

“I wanted them to see why their manager couldn’t spend more time on their estates. Some of our customers really had their eyes opened,” says Taylor.

Many tenants also encountered the group’s supported housing work for the first time. “Our general needs customers had no knowledge of our supported housing activity at all,” Taylor adds.

To attract as wide a pool of people as possible, Bromford gave each volunteer tenant £40 worth of vouchers for high-street shops. Unlike a cash payment, the vouchers would not affect any benefits the tenants were receiving. Childcare and travel costs were also reimbursed.

Taylor says the project has proved very popular. “People involved in consultation here said they now have a much more rounded picture of what a housing association is about,” he adds. “It’s also been a useful lesson for us about how we communicate with our customers about what we do – there’s nothing like actually seeing it.”

“Experience it” days are now oversubscribed and the association is receiving enquiries from tenants who have never taken part in consultation before. Taylor has been so impressed with the results of the scheme that he plans to take it a step further. The next project will involve job shadowing and specialised training for tenants who want to take part in high-level policy discussions with the board. “Some people came back saying ‘I would really like to shadow a housing manager’,” says Taylor. “They developed interests in particular areas of housing. It’s meant we can now better match clients to discussion groups, such as IT and finance.”

What’s your resolution?

Get more involved in the community

Who’s doing it well?

Touchstone Housing Association, Coventry

Touchstone has brought together local residents, community groups, council officers, the fire service and the police with the ambition of turning round the deprived area of Whitmore Reans and Dunstall in Wolverhampton

Why should you copy them?

Touchstone Housing won the Chartered Institute of Housing’s innovation award for the West Midlands last year for being the first association in England to take the lead on a neighbourhood management scheme. This is exactly the kind of activity that the National Housing Federation has been encouraging its members to take part in with its In Business for Neighbourhoods initiative, to get housing associations working more closely – and visibly – within their local communities.

Touchstone has 650 properties in Whitmore Reans and Dunstall, one of seven deprived areas where Wolverhampton council has set up neighbourhood management schemes. These are managed by different types of organisation including a church, the YMCA and a primary care trust as well as the housing association.

Pauline Gooden, Touchstone’s neighbourhood manager for the area, regularly meets officers from the other six to lobby the council for cash to solve city-wide problems. “It’s hard to change things with five different people knocking separately on a council officer’s door. It’s better to go together and say, ‘these issues are affecting all the areas’. You have a stronger voice,” says Gooden.

One of Touchstone’s greatest successes has been securing £1m from the council to keep the warden service running until 2006 – one of residents’ top priorities.

In March 2003, Gooden began an ambitious consultation, getting local schools and residents groups to construct a huge 3D model of the area. Then everyone was asked to physically pinpoint problem areas or things they didn’t like about the estate. “By the end, we had 2500 issues recorded on the map. People put things like, ‘this building doesn’t feel safe and needs demolishing’, or ‘we need a drug rehabilitation centre here’,” Gooden says.

Some common themes emerged – crime and safety, environmental issues, community facilities and health, transport and jobs. Touchstone’s team then drew up a detailed 218-page action plan with a timescale for addressing every single issue.

Residents have also been encouraged to take an active role in putting the action plan into practice by joining working groups that focus on each issue. Here they are able to talk to representatives from the police or the council. For example, there’s a safety group with 12 members, which includes wardens, police, tenants, residents, housing association officers and local business people.

Organisations looking to copy Touchstone’s success shouldn’t just wait for opportunities to present themselves. Although it wasn’t among Wolverhampton council’s original choices to lead one of the pilots, Touchstone raised £68,000 and lobbied the Housing Corporation for £104,000 more – easily convincing the council that the association meant business.

What’s your resolution?

Tackle antisocial behaviour

Who’s doing it well?

Blacon Neighbourhood Community Safety Partnership, Chester

The partnership has slashed the target time for removing abandoned cars from the Blacon Estate from seven days to just 30 minutes. It was commended in the ODPM’s 2004 neighbourhood management awards

Why should you copy them?

It may concern a single issue on just one estate, but this partnership has made enormous improvements to tenants’ quality of life. Between them, Chester council, Chester & District Housing Trust, residents, the fire service and the police have managed to clear 91 abandoned cars in the space of six months.

The project started in April and has saved about £2500 per car – it now costs £500 to remove a vehicle, rather than the £3000 if the fire service is called out to deal with a burnt-out one.

The scheme’s success has earned it praise from the Home Office, and seven other local authorities are now working on their own versions of it. This year, Chester police hope to extend it to the rest of the city.

Chester’s joint effort is a good example of responding to the issues that really blight residents’ lives. Julia Nundy, assistant area manager for Chester & District Housing Trust, says the project began when resident Brian Meade approached the landlord about the high numbers of abandoned cars on the estate and persuaded it to form a steering group to take action. “Everybody thought it was a good idea,” she Nundy.

To clear the backlog of cars, the partnership successfully bid for £131,000 from the ODPM’s arson control fund over three years. Then they changed the way the problem was handled. Residents now have a hotline to fire service headquarters to report abandoned cars. If a call is made during the day, the local authority will respond; if it’s out of hours, the police will.

Vehicles are checked on the police national computer and if they don’t have an identified owner or tax, they have an arrangement with a local garage to collect it. If the garage cannot locate the owner in three days, the car is crushed. The partnership is also working on prevention: the ODPM funding provides for a youth worker to give talks in schools about fire safety and car crime.

Putting the new system in place wasn’t easy because members of the partnership had to convince the council’s environmental team to adopt the new system. Community safety coordinator police sergeant Ken Ridgway says that under the old system they would put a notice on unregistered vehicles warning they’d be towed away in seven days if they were not removed.

“But this was like holding up a red rag to a bull. It was like saying, ‘please set me on fire’,” he says.

In 2002 an average of seven cars were being torched on Blacon Estate every week, a far higher number than in the rest of Chester. But the partnership’s efforts have transformed the landscape. “It’s made a huge difference,” says resident Brian Meades. “Just three cars have gone up in flames in the last four months: that’s an unbelievable improvement.”