Peak performance

Award-winning ALMO High Peak Community Housing is scaling the heights in its rugged Derbyshire home.

It was a proud moment for Sandra Webster and all at High Peak Community Housing when the organisation’s tenant liaison officer won the prestigious Midlands Housing/TPAS Tenant Liaison Officer of the year award for landlords back at the beginning of November. Tenant involvement in the High Peak area as at an all time high, and, say Webster’s employers, this is in large part due to the hard work and dedication of the award-winning TLO.

High Peak is convinced that its tenants have the right to be involved in the services they receive, and conversely that only through tenant involvement can it seek to improve its services in the most effective manner possible. Therefore, it always gives its tenants as much information as possible on all aspects of the service, and creates as many opportunities for tenants to express their views and opinions as possible. The High Peak Tenants’ Compact is an agreement between tenants and landlord that seeks to ensure all tenants have the chance to influence how their homes and communities are managed.

The agreement covers consultation, information and involvement in decisions that directly affect tenants, their homes and their communities.

On top of this, a number of ways for tenants to get involved with the management of their homes and communities exist. Several Area Panels exist across the borough. Each panel is made up of tenants, councillors and High Peak staff, and they regularly meet to discuss local issues, problems and challenges, as well as discussing how money should be spent in their area.

On a boroughwide level, representatives from each area panel attend the Tenants Forum. This meets every 2 months and considers changes in service and policies that are to be recommended to the High Peak Community Housing Board. Tenant Representatives pass on views and comments of the area panels to the Forum in order to influence decisions.

Meanwhile, one third of the 15-member board of High Peak Community Housing are also tenants. The tenant board members attend Tenant Forum meetings, as well as representing tenants views at board level.

Further opportunities for engagement and involvement arise through the periodical Tenant Conference, which keeps tenants up to date with High Peak’s priorities for the coming year, provides an opportunity for discussion, and also allows tenants to take part in workshops and visit stalls where they can find out more about the services provided, both by High Peak itself and other relevant parties.

A further array of tenant involvement programmes includes issue-based issue-focused Local Action Groups; regular tenant surveys; a Key Players Panel of hundreds of tenant volunteers who are randomly selected to take part in meeting, workshops or surveys, and Single Issues Panels covering subjects as broad as communications, consumer issues and the Disability Panel, which meets teice a year to discuss the needs of tenants with disabilities.

With so many avenues available to tenants to take a leading role in their communities and the service they receive, it’s clear that Webster and her colleagues at High Peak are rarely to be found idling, and the organisation even operates initiatives such as the tool share scheme, which provides loans of items such as lawnmowers and wheelbarrows, action days where tenants and staff head out onto the streets and green areas and tidy up, and regular estate walkabouts to check for damaged fencing, overgrown areas or graffiti. The tenants are kept informed of all these activities through the tenant newsletter, as well as the many meetings and workshops taking place, which even allows ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of the work to be shown.

Of course, much of the day-to-day liaison with tenants is focused around the Decent Homes work that High Peak, along with RSLs nationwide must complete to meet the Government’s standards. With over 4,000 homes to look after in its northwest Derbyshire heartlands, most of which will be affected by some degree of improvement work, there’s certainly plenty to keep tenants up to speed with.

Indeed, High Peak has gone one better than Decent Homes with its own Better Homes standard. This seeks to go beyond the strict tenets of the Decent Homes Standard and look at practical improvements for tenants that may not be covered by the government-set standard. For example, High Peak and its tenants observed that many of its older properties contained kitchens with built in pantries or larder style cupboards. While this may have been ideal in the days before the mass availability of refrigeration, it is hardly necessary today. Indeed, in many cases, the existence of these storage areas can dramatically reduce the size of the kitchen itself, leaving no room for modern appliance such as washing machines and fridges, not to mention limited worktop space. Hence, in such properties, and subject to tenants’ wishes, High Peak is aiming to redesign the layout of the kitchen to provide a larger, more user friendly-space, and one which goes well beyond the simple replacing worn out worktops and equipment required under the Decent Homes

Programme.

Despite this thorough approach to the work, High Peak expects to complete the work well before the original 2010 deadline, and is already looking at ensuring it maintains such high standards, with tenant empowerment a key driver in guaranteeing that this happens.

Elsewhere, High Peak is a key provider of telecare services, and fully accredited member of the Telecare Services Association, and provides a 24-hour care and support service for elderly or vulnerable residents through its Care Link scheme. With alarm buttons and mobile pendants which are worn about the person as well as falls detectors and 24-hour phone support, High Peak has been able to both better care for its more vulnerable tenants, and ease the pressure on local ambulance services called out for non-emergencies.

In an interesting further development, thanks to the existence of its 24- hour call centre for the Care Link service, High Peak has also taken on responsibility for monitoring the CCTV network in local town centres on behalf of the council. This is a capability it plans to extend further into lone worker security monitoring, and indeed, as ALMOs nationwide begin to look at ways to create income streams, is a service it could extend not only to its own staff, but those of the council and externally to businesses and organisations who have staff working outside the office alone.

High Peak may have only come into being in 2004, but it’s clearly taken giant strides in establishing its identity, and indeed ability, in the intervening years. As chief executive Sharon McCambridge notes: “Building on the work we have already undertaken to move tenants from being involved to being truly empowered, we will work to ensure that they are able to strongly influence the decisions made at the highest levels of the organisation – decisions that directly affect them, the services they receive and their quality of life. The key to our success will be to build on the strong partnerships that we have with the other key stakeholders in our communities.”