Welcome to our final customer newsletter of the year. Here is a brief reminder of things to note during the festive season. 

Service Access During the Festive Season  

Our offices will be closed from 1 pm on Tuesday 24 December 2024 and will reopen on Thursday 2 January 2025. If you need to report an emergency repair, please call our Homeforce team on 0300 555 0302, we have colleagues on a rota to help. 

Celebration Time 

Christmas and New Year are times of celebration. If you’re hosting a party, please make sure that you are respectful of your neighbours so everyone has a great time. 

Parking in our neighbourhoods is limited, so if you have guests who are driving, please ask them to park responsibly. 

As a reminder, Christmas is a great time to look after the planet and recycle any gift wrapping responsibly. 

Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) 

We appreciate all the feedback you took the time to give us, which is important for us to hear to improve our service delivery. Housing associations and councils are required to capture how satisfied our customers are with our service across a range of TSMs, which we covered in previous editions. The Regulator of Social Housing has now pulled together the data for all 355 organisations for 2023/24, which is published on their website https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/data-release-tsm-2024 . 

What you will see is BCHG’s ranking against other housing providers and where we appear out of the other 355 landlords in the scheme. 

We colleagues try to provide an excellent service and this shows our overall customer satisfaction is 9th overall in England and Wales, and there are other measures where BCHG rates in the Top 10%. There is one area where we could improve in relation to complaint handling, and we agreed on a service improvement plan at the Customer Scrutiny Conference 2024, which we reported in the November edition. 

Putting Things Right! - About the handling of complaints.

A new year presents a chance for a fresh start. We understand how frustrating it may be when things go wrong. Our aim is to make things right as soon as we can. 

We’ve learnt from your feedback about complaint handling that you appreciate a quick response and good communication. 

Let's make things right if you're frustrated about something and nobody is paying attention. Talk to us. Call our repair line on 0300 555 0302 if you need a repair, have a problem with damp, mould or condensation, or are having trouble moving around your house safely. Until we find out, we have no idea what we don't know! 

For any other issue, we provide you with a face-to-face contact through your Customer Relation Manager and Scheme Manager, and their contact detail was sent to you by letter, you can also find their contact details on our website here.

Let’s start 2025 by putting things right. 

Loneliness  

Loneliness can have a huge impact on an individual’s physical and mental wellbeing, but there are lots of simple actions people can take to help lift themselves, or others, out of loneliness. This includes: - 

  • Speaking to someone 

  • Joining a group 

  • Doing things you enjoy 

  • Connecting with others 

Christmas can be a difficult time for some people for a variety of reasons and if this affects you or someone you know then there is lots of support available:

 

Keeping Warm & Well 

Keeping warm throughout winter is really important. The keep warm, keep well is an NHS publication that has lots of advice for keeping warm during the winter months.

However you choose to celebrate the festive period, we hope it brings you peace and joy.