Across the Board – September update

I always feel like the previous year is old news by the time we get to September as the world moves so fast, but it is an important part of our governance and accountability.

We have to register our accounts with Companies House by the end of September each year. Our external auditors gave us a clean bill of health, with only a couple of minor recommendations, which is great when financial pressures are so pronounced. They also confirmed us as a going concern. Good financial management is so important if we are going to be ambitious in all the other things we want to achieve and our thanks go to the sometimes less visible finance team for all their work on this. This is also the time of year when we confirm through evidence our compliance with all our regulatory standards and confirm any potential conflicts of interest by the board members are recorded publicly.

As well as standard financial and performance reports the Board heard reports on how we are managing our supported housing schemes. We also reviewed our Customer Insight report, which pulls together all our sources of data on how our customers are telling us we are performing.

We heard feedback from the Service Improvement Forum – our customer forum- on their last meeting and issues they wanted to highlight to the board. The board were pleased to note improving performance for emergency repairs and better response times for complaint handling – both of which we know are significant for our customers. We are always thankful for all the work our involved customers do to review our performance and feed back to us any areas of concern.

We approved updated Value for Money and Information and Communications Strategies, as well as a review of how we manage risk.

At every board meeting we hear a customer story – often told from the viewpoint of staff but we would love to hear your stories directly if you have one to tell. This could be anything from how we managed a repair or how you gained support from any of our teams – we are grateful for positive and less positive stories – all of these help the board understand how things are from the customer perspective and help us improve our services.

The customer story this time was about how we worked in partnership with the Local Authority to try to help someone not managing so well to keep their tenancy and I hope anyone in that position may take heart from the huge amount of work a number of people undertook to help. The customer owned embarrassment about their position and found it hard to receive help, but we all need help at times in our lives and it is much harder for our staff when they know they could help and help is refused.

At our Annual General Meeting we appointed four new board members through open competition and we are really pleased to have them joining us. We also said goodbye to three board members – two because they came to the end of their term and one because a new role for them provides a conflict of interest. We are very grateful to all of the people that serve on the board and if you have any interest in joining us we have a development programme prepared by tenants for tenants and would love to hear from you.

Before our Annual General Meeting a number of the board spent the day visiting some of our customers homes; some in the middle of repairs and some being built. We had a chance to have lunch with some of our customers and were so very grateful for everyone that made us welcome. Our Annual General Meeting was also an opportunity to reflect on the past year and think about all the things we have achieved as an organisation – some of which is reported on our website. We are looking forward to all that this current year holds and hope, among other things, that our focus on a new strategy – ‘Earning trust through our actions’ will mean we do even better at hearing the voice of our customers and improving our services in response.