Local Offers - Delivering a Better Service

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• Local Offers - Delivering a Better Service

Under the Terms of the Tenant Services Authority Regulatory Framework, the Council is obliged to agree with its tenants a 'local offer' in terms of the service it offers its tenants.

This offer must be above what is generally expected under the terms of the Regulatory Framework although it needs to reflect its overall context. This 'local offer' is also made as part of the overall commitment to partnership between the Council and its tenants and leaseholders, as set out in the Residents' Compact.

The Council wants to make a real difference to the way its tenants and leaseholders receive, access and, most importantly, change the way in which it offers its housing service so that it can deliver the best service that it can.

This menu of involvement represents what the Council hopes to achieve in partnership with its residents. We need to agree a timetable with our resident representatives, including the Kingston Federation of Residents (the organisation that represents Kingston’s tenants and leaseholders). We will report our progress in our Annual Report in October 2011.

Customer Service

The Council will:

• Answer 80% of telephone calls within 30 seconds
• See 95% of customers visiting one of its customer contact points without an appointment within 15 minutes of arrival
• Acknowledge all emails to within1 working day
• Reply to all  written correspondence (letters and email) within 10 working days
• Resolve 80% of queries received by a customer contact team, either over the phone or face to face without referral to anyone else.
• W e will not use voicemail on telephone numbers that are published for customers during office hours.

Customer Choice

The Council will:

• Ensure tenants and leaseholders can access the Council’s services in a way that suits them, by phone, email, letter, face to face in a Council office or by appointment in their own home.
• Ensure all tenants can view their rent accounts on line and make rent payments by phone or on through the Council’s website.
• Allow tenants and leaseholders to report a repair and be able to track the progress of any repair online.

Involvement and Empowerment - Estate Management Agreements (EMAs)

The Council will seek to establish Estate Management Agreements (EMAs) for any estates or group of estates whose residents wish to do so. This will not be an easy process and the exact form of any agreement will need to be negotiated with local people.

Part of the move to establish an EMA will be to ensure that local people have the capacity to monitor its success. The format of an EMA may vary from estate to estate but may include:

• enabling local people to scrutinise local delivery of particular (and/or potentially all) housing services with a view to improving local efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness to tenants
• enabling local people to take some control over Council services with a possible long term aim of building local community capacity to the extent that they might develop models akin to tenant management organisations in a more hands on way.

In order to develop EMA’s we will need to agree with residents what it is possible and practical to be offered locally in terms of local estate agreements. Specifically, the following questions will need to be considered:

• What service areas will residents want to have influence over and what roles are they likely to want to play which could include?
• a scrutiny role (i.e. checking the council’s standards of service delivery in the area)
• a management role (i.e. helping to determine how services are managed locally – such as participating in management of local caretakers)  
• a delivery role – (i.e. the lettings process – welcoming new tenants etc or carrying out some of the caretakers functions themselves)?
• What could be managed locally, what would be the implications of this for the overall service and what information is or could be made available at a local level to allow effective scrutiny?  

Housing service areas that could be considered as part of an EMA, although it would take time before all of these options could be exercised

In delivering any EMA programme it will be necessary to ensure that all people are able to participate in the process and to do so it will be essential to understand what is the demography of the population in the area (e.g. families/single people, black and minority ethnic mix, unemployed/working etc).

Above all an estate Management Agreement is there to hold the Council accountable to its tenants and leaseholders for the services it delivers and the way it does so.

Offering a Menu of Involvement
The Council knows that the quality of your home, your neighbourhood and the housing service you receive makes a big difference to the quality of your life.

These things matter to your local Council and to the Kingston Federation.  We want you to receive the best possible housing service, and giving us your views and opinions is a key part of achieving this.   

So we want to give you as many opportunities as possible to make it easier for you to input your views and shape the housing service. Your participation can make a difference because it helps to identify problems and highlight ways in which we can change and improve housing services.

There are lots of different ways you can get involved.  Whether you have just 10 minutes to spare, or you want a regular active role, there are ways to get involved that suit everyone.  Some of them only take up a little of your time – and some you can even do without leaving your home.  Others take longer, happen more often and involve coming to meetings. The following are examples of how you can get involved.

• Attending a Local Residents Association Meeting
  Residents have set up local residents associations in several parts of Kingston and if you live in the areas they cover, they will welcome you to attend their meetings.  Residents Associations take up housing and other neighbourhood issues and, sometimes, local councillors and staff attend their meetings.  Resident Associations will play a very important role in setting up local or borough-wide EMA’s.
• Setting up a Local Residents Association
  If there isn’t already a local residents association in your area, you could work with your fellow residents to set one up.  The Council and Federation will give you plenty of practical advice and support to help you set up a residents association and some grant funding and other resources are available to help you do this.  Residents associations can be a great way to bring the local community together.
• Becoming more involved in the Kingston Federation
  You can also become more involved in the Kingston Federation, attending its meetings and becoming active in a range of key housing issues that involve the Federation negotiating directly with the Council about changes to its services. Any Council tenant or leaseholder can join the Federation whether or not they are members of a residents association.
• Attending the Housing Consultative Committee (HCC)
  The Council holds regular HCC meetings with residents to discuss housing matters. It is attended by councillors, housing staff and resident representatives, and meetings are open to any Kingston tenant, leaseholder or resident.   These meetings look at policy and performance issues and as the most formal of the participation options, they have significant influence on housing policy outcomes. HCC also appoints people to a variety of sub groups such as a Tenant Scrutiny Panel to look at the details of the housing policy and performance.
• The Sounding Board
  Through our “Sounding Board” we ask a group of tenants and leaseholders  to give us views on service areas in which they are interested.  By ‘signing up’ as a Sounding Board member, you will be contacted by e-mail, telephone or through meetings, and asked for your views on a range of issues.
• Completing Surveys
  From time to time, we will contact you by internet, by post or over the telephone to ask your opinions on different aspects of our housing service.
• Mystery Shopping and Tenant Inspection
  By participating in ‘mystery shopping’ and tenant inspections, you can really help us to find out how well our services are being delivered to tenants and leaseholders.  We provide training for tenants willing to carry out inspections, and you will be able to get together with other residents to discuss your findings.
• Focus Groups
  We will hold one off meetings with groups of tenants and leaseholders to discuss particular issues with tenants.
• Public Meetings
  We sometimes hold public meetings for tenants and leaseholders. to discuss particular issues.  This usually happens when we are considering making a significant change to the service.

Helping to Make Policy Changes
The Council will ensure that residents' representatives are involved in all significant changes to housing policy and procedures that will impact directly on tenants and leaseholders, for example changes to policies and procedures relating to dealing with anti social behaviour, or the way in which we let our properties.

We will ensure that there are residents on our policy review groups along with staff where we think this offers the best way forward.

Funding Resident Participation
The Council will give the Federation an annual budget to allow it to employ a worker and to allow it to fund improvements to resident participation in the Borough.

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The Council will:

• Ensure that all of its homes meet the Government's decent homes standard in the next five years.
• Involve residents in any decisions to appoint new main contractors or extend existing contracts.
• Work with residents to get their feedback on the quality of works done to their homes and to monitor repairs performance.
• Agree Service Standards with residents and publish them so that performance against them can be properly measured.
• Involve residents in the design, prioritisation and delivery of a housing improvement and investment programme, agree delivery targets and monitor the Council’s performance against them.

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The Neighbourhood and Community Standard involves not only the housing service but also the way that it works with other council departments and other organisations - such as the police, other landlords, the NHS and the voluntary sector.

The Council will:

• Give any resident who receives a caretaking service a choice about the way they receive it, including whether they receive a weekend service. This will include ensuring that residents understand how much each service option will cost to allow informed choices to be made.
• Agree caretaking service standards that will ensure that residents have a clear understanding of when they can expect a caretaker to be on their estate, how long for and the standard of service that they should expect. They will also understand any other jobs that the caretaker will carry out, for instance changing light bulbs or carrying out minor repairs.
• The Council will work with other organisations working in neighbourhoods, and as part of other One Kingston initiatives, to target resources to deal with wider issues such as health, poor educational attainment and low levels of employment.
• Participate in a local crime audit.

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The Council will:

• Work with its residents to respond to initiatives from Central Government and those from the London Mayor on housing - and to ensure that the Council’s response to changes is the best deal for its existing and future tenants and leaseholders.
• Offer a menu of support so that older people can remain in their own homes for as long as possible.
• Visit all of its properties every four years to ensure that there is no illegal subletting and to discuss tenants housing options to make best use of the Council’s housing stock.

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The Council’s Local Offer to it tenants and leaseholders, sets out how we will make ourselves accountable to you.

We want tenants and leaseholders to help us decide the type of service that we deliver, the targets that we set and to ensure that residents monitor council performance and hold us to account where we do not deliver what we promise.

We will publish our progress against this local offer in our Annual Report published each October. We will also report our performance to Housing Consultative Committee and to local people through Estate Management Agreements (EMAs). Where we do not deliver, residents can complain to Local Councillors, MPs, the Local Government Ombudsman or to the Tenant Services Authority.

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