Improving our communities

We take so much pride in supporting our residents and helping their communities to thrive. In 2022/23 we made large investments to help support our tenants and those affected by the cost-of-living crisis. 

Supporting residents with money worries

In April 2022 we partnered with local charity Citizens Advice Watford on a project called Your Money Matters, which gave Watford Community Housing customers a fast track to tailored, expert money advice. 

151 residents benefited from this project, receiving support worth more than £200,000.

Read more about the project here.

Our Financial Inclusion Team also worked incredibly hard to support our tenants by providing money advice, food vouchers, and helping people make sure they are receiving all the benefits they are eligible for. In 2022 we pledged to not evict anyone as a result of financial hardship as long as they are actively engaging with us to stay on top of their tenancy, and we helped 16 households with Discretionary Housing Payments to help clear their arrears – this came to a total of £20,998.

Our Welfare Fund – which we set up in 2020 to provide financial support to those worst affected by the Covid-19 pandemic – has continued to help those most in need during the current cost-of-living crisis.

Working with our partners

As part of our Let’s Go! Business Plan, we’re committed to investing £1 million in community projects between 2020 and 2025. We continue to support our Nifty (over) Fifty group, Solo Stars, our nine tenant and residents’ associations and many more groups and projects. 

Working with Watford Borough Council, we hosted a series of ‘welcoming spaces’ across some of our community hubs and independent living facilities, which allowed people to pop in for a hot drink, to play a board game, or just to socialise with others.

Read more about 'welcoming spaces' here.

Together with local partners – Watford Borough Council, Watford FC CSE, Random Café, Meriden Residents’ Association and Beezee Bodies – we were part of a great project that aimed to help families in the Meriden area cook healthy meals on a budget. The families learnt to cook a tasty vegetarian chilli in the slow cooker and were even given a free slow cooker so they could make the meals themselves at home.

Involving our residents

As a community gateway housing association, we put our customers at the heart of everything we do. It’s so important for us to listen to the feedback from our customers and act upon it, and we do this in a number of ways, such as holding ‘tenant question time’ events (TQTs) and ‘scrutiny sprints’. Our TQTs allow customers to ask questions directly to a panel of our staff and in 2022/23 these events covered damp and mould, customer contact, our Estate Services contract, and allocations and tenancy changes.

Find out how to join our scrutiny panel.

We also held scrutiny sprints – which is where customers spend a day with our staff getting a ‘deep dive’ into the subject matter – covering these topics. Customers get to share their opinions on what we are getting right and where we can make improvements. 

Read more about these events here.

Having your say on our policies

Following feedback from customers, we’ve worked to streamline our succession process, for when a tenant passes away and the tenancy needs to be transferred to a loved one. We wanted to make the customer journey more consistent and to make the experience as smooth as possible to help reduce any additional stress or worry during such a difficult time.

We worked with our Gateway Membership Team and other customers to determine what the new process should look like and how we can make improvements. This has led to an internal review of our communications, and we will be embedding the new process into our IT systems to ensure consistency across our services.

Our Vulnerable Customers Policy has also been refreshed, enabling us to provide even more targeted support to those who need it most, by ensuring more regular contact and easy access to our services. 

Finding the right home

Over the last year we have seen a reduction in our rent arrears, with the team taking a ‘collecting with care’ approach, ensuring our customers are supported with their finances and signposted to any additional help that may be available. 

We have also helped a number of customers move to homes that are more suited to their needs, reducing their energy bills, and worked with Watford Borough Council’s homelessness team to prevent evictions. 

Anyone looking to complete a mutual exchange can also now use ‘Swaptracker’, available through the Homeswapper website, to keep track of the process and get real time updates on how it’s progressing.

Providing tailored support

In 2022/23 we completed 1,362 customer reviews, which involve our staff visiting people in their homes. Sometimes this will be right at the beginning of a tenancy, helping people to find their feet and settle into a new home, or it might be to help someone manage their current tenancy more easily by discussing rent, exploring options for aids and adaptations, or talking them through the ways in which they might be able to move to a more suitable property.