Connect staff are always alert for ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of how we work, right across the range of our activities, to keep rents as affordable as possible, and the quality of our services high.
We are sure that our tenants have ideas about how we can improve the Value For Money (VFM) of our services, and we have created the following form for sending us your VFM ideas. Just fill it out and click 'Submit'. Messages sent from this form will be read by Dear Prudence, our staff team of VFM champions.
You can also have a look at our VFM performance on Connect's HouseMark Dashboard|.
And keep an eye out for the 'Delivering Value For Money' badge next to stories in Get Connected, our tenant newsletter, to see all of the different ways we are working to achieve greater VFM.
Dear Prudence Form
from our 2011 Annual Report|:
In these times of austerity, we are doubly keen to keep our rents as affordable as possible whilst continuing to invest in services which meet the needs and aspirations of our customers, particularly as other local services are scaled back. This requires us to be smart in the way we buy our goods and services and the way we organise ourselves. This year our staff team have been working on a ‘Beat Bureaucracy’ campaign, stripping away unnecessary activities to meet customer requests as quickly and straight-forwardly as we can.
By canny tendering of contracts and budgeting we have saved enough to expand our successful Neighbourhood Ranger Service from two to four Rangers, and will be employing our own painting team. The in-house handyperson service has received excellent feedback from our tenants during the last two years, and it saves us money to boot – so growing the service only makes sense.
Although, as is average for most landlords, 79% of our tenants consider they get value for money from their rent, we want to improve this position. As maintenance is an area of high expenditure for us, we are working with colleagues from other landlords to carry out a value for money review of our repairs service. We also want to understand more about how our customers judge value for money and will be asking them in a series of focus groups in the coming year.