Housing

Social housing continues to face a challenging operating environment with changes to welfare rules, increased demand and pressure on budgets. This follows a period of rapid change with the introduction of housing association partnerships, Arm’s Length Management Association (ALMO), and the Private Finance Initiative funding.  

Blueprint's consultants are working with our local authority customers to help them plan the way forward.  Our management information systems have for years provided housing directorates, Registered Social Landlords and ALMOs with the tools they need to manage rent collection, arrears, repairs and maintenance and organisation-wide financial planning. Increasingly, we are being asked to assist with the challenge of managing anti-social behaviour and building sustainable communities.

From strategic planning issues to the day-to-day tasks, such as the management of repairs, our systems can enable efficiencies that reduce costs. For example, if your repairs team is providing a timely and efficient service; pinpoint the cause of persistent problems with quality – whether it’s poor call handling, the initial briefing process, the performance of a particular contractor, or even an individual in one area who’s letting the team down.

Among the issues we are working on with our social housing sector customers are the following:

Rent collection: ‘I want to visualise and monitor the rent collection process throughout the borough - can that be done? We want to know which members of our rent collection team are not observing our policies, and why not.’

Arrears escalation: ‘How can we anticipate a potential rent arrears problem?  With 60% of our tenants in arrears and just 50 collection staff, how should we target our resources?’

Responsive repairs: ’We want to compare the performance of our contractors in each part of the borough. We opened a call centre to speed up repairs but it doesn’t seem to be working: how can we find out what’s wrong?’

Planned maintenance: ‘I need a system that helps me to set priorities for maintenance and re-calibrate them if budgets are cut. We tend to get lost in the detail: we really need a system of alerts that will pop up and remind us what’s urgent.’

Complaints and anti-social behaviour: ‘We would like to link every complaint we receive, from whatever source, so we can target hot spots and identify individuals who cause the greatest problems for our communities.’  

Sustainable communities: ‘We collect a lot of information about changing demographics and patterns of need, but when it comes to planning, we find it difficult to bring all our information together so that we can analyse it and set priorities’. 

Development: ‘I want to model future cash flows from the different housing options we are considering, so that we can perform ‘what if’ scenarios and make better informed decisions.’ 

Blueprint for Housing Associations