Service Standards

Our resident promise

Our resident promise is to all our residents renting a home with us. We will provide homes and communities which create opportunities to change lives by putting our residents first.

 

Our promise to you

·         We will provide you a good quality home and service.

·         We will listen to you and act on your feedback.

·         We will keep you safe.

·         We will be transparent and fair.

·         We will put things right.

·         We will treat you as an individual.

Our service standards

Your feedback has told us that the most important thing about our service is that it is consistent, we always do what we say we will do and we do it in the time we agreed with you.

We’ve created these service standards to set out our promises to you, to highlight how you can challenge us where we have not met them and to ensure that everyone receives the best possible service every time.

 

 

Providing good quality homes and services

We will:

·      Maintain your home to a good standard.

·      Complete your repairs on time.

·      Look after your neighbourhood and external areas.

·      Work with you and partner organisations to help you maintain your home.

·      Make it easy for you to deal with us.

 

Maintain your home to a good standard

·      When you move in your home will meet our new home standard. 

·      We will explain your tenancy and tell you what you are responsible for and what you can expect from us.

·      We will sign you up to MyCKH where you can manage your account and tenancy online whenever it suits you.

 

Repairing your home

·      You can report repairs to us 24 hours a day by using our website or calling us on 01733 385000. For your safety please call us for all emergencies repairs so we can organise a repair as quickly as possible.

·      We will offer you a choice of appointments (except in emergencies)

o   Morning - 8am to 1pm

o   Afternoon - 1pm to 6.30pm

o   The school run - 9.30am to 2.30pm

o   Saturday - 8am to 1pm

·      We will confirm your appointment by text or email and on the morning of the appointment we will text you with details of when we are likely to arrive.

·      When you report a repair, we tell you what category it falls into and how long it will take us to complete it. It will be an emergency repair completed in 24 hours, an urgent repair completed in seven days, or a routine repair completed in 28 days.

·      We will aim to complete the repair on our first visit. Where this is not possible, we will let you know when it will be finished.

·      We will always leave your home tidy after completing inspections or repair jobs.

 

Looking after your neighbourhood and external areas

·      We will regularly visit and inspect your neighbourhood and communal area to check that the area is up to standard and identify any problems.

·      We will tell you who is responsible for maintaining your area, sometimes it is us and sometimes it is a managing agent. If it is a management agent, we monitor their work and hold them to account.

·      We will clean communal blocks on a rota basis and ensure you know how often we will visit and what cleaning we will do.

·      You will have a dedicated Neighbourhood Manager who will hold walkabout surgeries where you can meet them and talk about any tenancy matters or put forward ideas for improving your neighbourhood. We will let you know the dates on our website, by email and in our Keylines newsletter.

·      We will be active in your neighbourhood working with partners to provide support  from community cafes, community centres, and wellbeing gardens to one off events, clubs and support groups. We will advertise these on our website, by email and in our Keylines newsletter and community hubs.

 

Work with you and partner organisations to help you maintain your home

·      We will visit your home every year to carry out a property condition visit. This will enable us to understand your needs, and any additional support your household may need. We will also check the condition of your home and make sure there is no damp and mould present. We will offer you a choice of appointments and aim to visit at a time that suits you.

·      We will provide or recommend support to help you manage your tenancy if your circumstances change or you’re facing difficulties. We will only seek eviction as a last resort.

o   We will offer money advice if you are struggling with the cost of living and offer support from careers clubs and getting qualifications to finding work and work experience.

o   We will provide specialist support if you are struggling to maintain your home due to disability or mental ill health.

 

Making it easy for you to deal with us

·      We will always respect you and your home.

·      You can call Customer First on 01733 385000, or our Repairs Centre on 01733 385030, or if you are in Peterborough, you can visit us at Customer Central on Bridge Street. However you contact us colleagues will always give you their name, so you know who is dealing with your request.

·      We will acknowledge written correspondence (including emails and social media) that require a response within a maximum of two working days.

·      If you request a face-to-face meeting or a home visit we will try to offer you a time that suit your needs.

·      We will always wear an identity badge and explain the purpose of our visit before entering your home. You can call us to check the identity of anyone purporting to be from CKH or working on our behalf. For your added peace of mind, if you want you can contact us to set up a password for us to use when we visit.

·      For pre-arranged appointments we will let you know we are coming by calling you in advance, or sending reminders by text, letter or email.

·      If you tell us, we will respect any religious or cultural requirements that you may have.

 

Rent and service charges

·      We will set your rent in accordance with your tenancy agreement and, where applicable, in line with the Rent Standard set by the government.

·      We will send you a rent review letter each year to tell you about any changes to your rent or service charges.

·      We will only charge you for the services you receive and will calculate charges carefully to make sure they are as accurate as possible.

·      You will be able to access your balance and statements online 24 hours a day through MyCKH.

·      We will make paying your rent as convenient as possible and will list the range of ways that you can pay on our website and in our letters and emails.

 

Listening to you and acting on your feedback

·      We will design our resident engagement in partnership with you and welcome anyone who wants to work with us to ensure all voices and views are heard.

·      We will support groups that residents want, including:

o   Resident Experience Panel

o   Service Improvement Panel

o   Estate Improvement and Investment Panel

o   Complaints Panel

o   Communications and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Panel

o   Neighbourhood Champions

o   Shared Ownership Pannel

o   Extra Care and Retirement Housing Panel

·      We will consult with residents before we change our services or standards.

·      We will collect feedback when we deliver a service to you and use your feedback to review and when necessary, improve our services.

 

Keeping you safe

·      As a minimum we will maintain your homes to the government’s Decent Homes Standard and be compliant with all health and safety legal requirements.

·      It is a legal requirement for us to carry out annual gas safety and an electrical test every five years. We will arrange an appointment with you to complete these.

·      We will complete a stock condition survey of your home every five years and use this information to decide what work we need to do to maintain it.

·      Each year we will provide you with a property condition certificate that outlines the key performance of your home and dates of future visits.

·      We will support you if you are suffering from anti-social behaviour, hate incidents or domestic violence. We will publish our policies which will describe how we will work with you and partner organisations to prevent and tackle these crimes.

·      We will give you clear timescales and an action plan when you report incidents of anti-social behaviour, hate crime or domestic abuse.

·      We will keep to any timescales and action plans agreed with you and we will contact you before closing your case to ask how satisfied you were with how we handled it.

·      We will work with partners (such as the police, fire service and local charities) to try to make your neighbourhood safer.

 

Be transparent and fair

·      We will always be friendly and helpful. We will tell you clearly what we can and can’t do alongside the timescales we will work to, always aiming to resolve your query as quickly as possible.

·      If you ask us, we will always be here to support you either directly or by putting you in touch with others who can help.

·      We will keep you informed about what's happening either in person, in print or online. We will consult with you before making significant changes to how we manage your home or our services.

·      We will be open with you about our performance and what we're doing to improve.

o   We will complete the Tenant Satisfaction Measures annually and publish these on our website and in our Keylines newsletter and reports.

o   We will maintain and update the resident’s dashboard designed by residents. We will update the information you told us was most important to you every three months.

o   We will provide financial statements and a residents annual report each year, so you can see where your money has gone and how it has benefited residents and the wider community. This will be available on our website and communicated to you through our Keylines newsletter or our regular emails.

 

Putting things right

·      We always aim to get things right, but on occasion things go wrong. When they do, we will:

o   Say sorry and put things right as soon as we can.

o   Aim to fix things the first time.

o   Check you are happy with the outcome.

·      We will make it simple for you to complain, in any way that suits you.

o   Over the phone on 01733 385000.

o   In person when we visit you, meet you in your neighbourhood or at one of our community hubs or Customer Central.

o   By email to Marta.Ariza-Castro@crosskeyshomes.co.uk

o   On our website www.crosskeyshomes.co.uk or by Live Chat.

o   In writing to CKH Customer Central, 60a Bridge Street, Peterborough PE1 1DT.

·      When you do complain, we will acknowledge the complaint in five working days and aim to resolve your complaint in 10 working days from the acknowledgement.

·      We will check you are happy with the outcome and ask for your feedback on how we handled your complaint.

·      We will learn from our complaints and your feedback and share with you what we do well and where we need to do better.

Treating you as an individual

·      We are committed to ensuring our services can easily be accessed by all our residents, including those who have disabilities or other additional needs. Wherever and whenever it is possible for us to do so, we will adjust the way in which we communicate with you or deliver our services to you, to meet your needs.

·      We are committed to ensuring Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is embedded across all our services and actively promote this in everything we do.

·      We publish our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy, Vulnerability Strategy and Reasonable Adjustment Policy that sets out how we will work with you as an individual and the adaptations we can make.

·      You can work with us in the way that suits you best, our services are available online, in person and over the phone.