Annual Report
Welcome to the One Manchester Annual Customer Report 2020
Looking back at 2020 shows how tough the year has been and this report shows how our organisation performed in delivering services to you in 2019/20. We reflect on the things we did well and can build upon, and those where we need to do better and how we plan to do that.
We started 2020 by saying goodbye to my predecessor Dave Power who had been Chief Executive at One Manchester for five years. My commitment to you is that One Manchester will continue to be more than just a landlord.
This year we developed new ways for you to get involved including our new ‘Customer Coalition’ - a mixture of residents who have volunteered to help us improve our services. We have also begun our telephone survey and over 1,000 of you have expressed your interest in giving your opinions to help us improve and we look forward to working with you.
We hope you find this report useful and welcome your feedback.
Nic Kershaw
It’s been a challenging year!
The pandemic has presented us all with challenges and keeping you and our colleagues safe has been our focus during this time. We made over 20,000 phone calls to help you with access to food, fuel, and essential baby supplies, as well as supporting you with your emotional and mental wellbeing. You can read more about what this meant to both our staff and those we helped on our website.
A lot of our colleagues are now providing services to you from their homes, so we have adopted a more flexible way of working.
We know our repairs service is important to you and we have monitored the situation throughout the year. There have been times when we have paused some types of repairs to reduce the number of homes we enter, but we’ve continued with emergency repairs and important safety checks to make sure that homes are safe.
Shaping our Future
In August 2020 we recognised that the impact of Covid-19 to your life, wellbeing and income meant that we could not stand still and simply continue as we were, so we began our business change programme – Shaping Our Future.
Shaping Our Future was created with several aims in mind:
- Deliver a brilliant customer experience every time
- Build consistency, inclusivity, and tackle inequality
- Strengthen the finances of customers and One Manchester
- Work in new ways that suit our customers and our colleagues
- Grow our people to be the best that they can be
- Maximise opportunities that benefit you our customers
To achieve our aim of delivering a brilliant customer experience every time, we’ve learnt we need to keep our promises, make it easy for you to contact us, put things right when they go wrong, and listen to what you think is important. Our focus over the next 12-months will be on creating services that do this.
During 2019/20:
- Our One Money team helped 732 customers deal with £833k of debt and increased their income by £1,246,574.
- Employment services from our One Future team helped 308 people find jobs, 92 gained volunteering opportunities, 425 received training, 141 people were given 1:1 self-employment support, and 69 people took part in work placements.
- Our Community Safety service received 2,804 contacts from residents. They opened 520 new anti-social behaviour cases, handled 122 legal actions, 48 injunctions, 21 powers of arrest were obtained, and two evictions were carried out.
- £359,554 was spent with not-for-profit organisations including charities and community organisations.
- We awarded grants to charitable projects totalling £201,771.
- We made 49 funding awards to 45 local organisations and projects including youth groups, arts and music projects, over 50s groups.
- We contributed £54k to 24 projects with our Community Soup events.
Listening to you
In our 2020 survey the Net Promoter Score, a widely used measure of recommendation, was 18. The average for housing associations nationwide was 6.7 and the all-sector average was 19.4 so we are pleased you rated us so highly.
In 2020 the top three things you wanted us to improve were to keep your areas cleaner, make it easier to contact the right person to help you, and to resolve problems more quickly.
In January 2021 we began our customer telephone survey to understand more about you and your experience of us. We are now aiming to contact all customers during the next 12-months and the feedback will help us to improve the experience you receive.
Your voice matters
Our Customer Voice Strategy intends to assure you that your voice matters to us and that we take action on what we’re being told. The vision of the strategy is:
The customer voice is heard, respected, valued and acted on throughout One Manchester and is core to who we are as an organisation and how we deliver services to our customers.
To help us achieve this we’ll be launching new customer groups:
- Customer Co-creation team – Designing and developing solutions alongside One Manchester
- Customer Purchasing team – Having a say on how customer money is spent
- Building Safety team – Shaping the way we keep our customers safe in their homes
- Customer Scrutiny team - Researching our services and recommending improvements
If you would like to learn more or are interested in joining one of the groups, please contact wendy.woodfine@onemanchester.co.uk
The customer voice is heard, respected, valued and acted on throughout One Manchester and is core to who we are as an organisation and how we deliver services to our customers.
Making a complaint
We take all complaints that we receive seriously and have put a lot of work into making our process fair and easy to follow. You can read more about the complaints process here.
We received 75 formal complaints between 1st April 2019 and 31st March 2020. Of those:
- 1 was withdrawn; 37 were upheld; 19 were partially upheld; 18 were not upheld
14 of these complaints were escalated to stage two, of which:
- 8 were upheld; 0 were partially upheld; 6 were not upheld
Response timescales (all working days):
- To acknowledge at stage one: 1.11 days (2-day target)
- To respond at stage one: 9.25 days (10-day target)
- To respond at stage two: 16.75 days (20-day target)
For the second year we met our targets for acknowledging and responding to complaints. We are now improving the quality of responses and to make sure we learn from complaints.
What we changed because of your feedback
- Staff received training on understanding autism as well as equality, diversity, and inclusion.
- We introduced a process to make sure complaints from non-tenants or former tenants can be captured properly.
In addition, we:
- improved our complaints policy and process using learning and guidance from the Institute of Customer Service and the Housing Ombudsman
- formed a complaints team responsible for checking responses are sent on time and are of good quality
- carried out an in-depth analysis of all 2019/20 formal complaints to make improvements
Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)
We believe our services and opportunities should be accessible, responsive, and good, no matter who you are or where you live. We recognised that we don’t know enough about you and whether you’re happy with us, use our services, or need to complain to get what you need. Our survey to find out about you and your household includes some questions which are a little more sensitive such as those relating to your health, sexuality or gender identity, but will help us assess if different services are needed in order to meet all of your needs.
We know we need to do some things better, so we have developed an Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Action Plan that our Board is closely monitoring.
As part of our commitment to EDI, we continue to publish the diversity statistics of our customers, staff, and Board and Co-optees (invited members) available in the table on the back page of this report.
HouseProud Member
We are a member of HouseProud North West – the network for housing providers to improve the way we engage, support, and deliver services to our LGBT+ communities. The group has three key areas of focus:
- Tackling stigma and awareness-raising
- Developing good practice in supporting our older LGBT+ customers
- Creating opportunities for residents to tell us what they think to help us to improve
We hosted the HouseProud Customer Conference where residents could tell us their thoughts about the services we provide and the issues affecting them. We used the feedback to create an action plan and created a Greater Manchester-wide customer LGBT+ network, Rainbow Roofs.
We have also signed the HouseProud pledge to show our commitment to LGBT+ resident equality and support. This provides a framework for all landlords to work with involved residents and make improvements.
Working with customers
Moss Side
Following the tragic deaths of two people at an event in Moss Side in the summer, as well as the injustices highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, we now lead a group of housing associations with homes in Moss Side. The group has set up a £50k fund to help local groups respond to the needs in the area.
Black and Minority Ethnic Health
We have begun a partnership with the Caribbean and African Health Network (CAHN), a well-respected BME specific organisation focused on health outcomes across Manchester, to reach into our communities to talk about our services, job opportunities and apprenticeships.
Mental Health
As part of the BeWell service, we are helping people improve the mental health of customers through social activities. We carried out 299 assessments leading to 151 people being placed into the BeWell service.
Helping you remain in your home
We want to support those with a physical disability to remain in their home through aids and adaptations. We work in partnership with Manchester’s Service for Independent Living (MSIL) and in
2019/20 we spent £576k on 70 major adaptations. Read about our customer adaptation story. If you are struggling to get in and out of your home, bathe or move around indoors, then contact us using the web form on our website or by ringing us on 0330 355 1000.
Digital inclusion for all
Lockdown has highlighted the need to use the internet and social media and we have supported older residents in some tower blocks by providing tablets and internet access. We also helped a group of isolated younger people through a project that gave them mobile phones. Read about Joe’s experience.
How we’ve spent your rent
- Total spend on repairs in 2019/20 was £9.8million, and in 2018/19 spend was £8.4 million
- Maintenance cost per home for 2019/20 was £825, up by £111 (£714 in 2018/19)
- Cost per home of major repairs for 2019/20 was £687 (£873 in 2018/19)
- Improvements – £5.6million in 2019/20 (£5.4million in 2018/19) which included boiler replacements, CCTV upgrades at 11 Hulme tower blocks, and heating replacements at three tower blocks.
Where every £1 goes
| Description of Cost | Pence in Every Pound |
| Salaries and cost of services including IT, HR, Neighbouhood teams etc. | £0.24 |
| Providing chargeable services | £0.05 |
| Day to day repairs and empty homes work | £0.13 |
| Cyclical repairs: including gas and electrical servicing to keep properties safe | £0.03 |
| Major repairs (e.g. roofing programmes; new boiler programmes; where we swap out major components) | £0.05 |
| Cladding and fire safety | £0.01 |
| Cost of rent arrears | £0.01 |
| Cost of all assets (houses and major fixed assets) | £0.12 |
| Investing in neighbourhoods, communities and customers | £0.03 |
| Cost of not proceeding with new property developments | £0.02 |
| Interest payments on our loans to build homes and fund our business | £0.12 |
| Spare income - all invested into business | £0.20 |
Each year we report and compare our costs against those of other housing providers. Our overall costs per home was £3,077. This is made up of five cost elements – management, service charge, maintenance, major repairs, and other. The median (middle) cost for the sector is £3,695 per home, so we compare favourably with that figure.
We have ranked ourselves against other providers nationally and within the north west:
| Group | One Manchester cost / rank | Lowest cost in group | Highest cost in group |
| All providers | £3,077 - 41st of 217 | £2,087 | £26,599 |
| All north west providers | £3,077 - 8th of 39 | £2,539 | £6,264 |
In 2016 we began our ambitious aim to build and acquire over 1,000 homes by 2021 to help address the need for more suitable housing in Manchester. At financial year end (March 2020), 654 homes were completed, 363 were in contract, and 426 had been approved - a total of 1,443.
1,443 split by tenancy type –
| Social rent: | 189 |
| Affordable rent: | 263 |
| Intermediate rent: | 5 |
| Market rent: | 348 |
| Rent to buy: | 419 |
| Shared ownership: | 219 |
How we performed in 2019/20
| Target | 2016/17 | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | Comments | |
| Amount of rent collected | 100.5% | 100.1% | 100.4% | 100.6% | 100.0% | Rent collection was at the 100% mark this year, slightly under our target. |
| % of empty homes available to new tenants | 5% | 4.20% | 4.45% | 4.33% | 4.39% | The percentage of homes available to new tenants remains consistent with previous years and on target. |
| Average number of bids for each property advertised on Manchester Move | 90 | 135 | 179 | 257 | 399 | Demand for our homes has increased for the fourth year running and reflects the need for more housing in the city. |
| Time to re-let once tenancy has ended | 16 days | 20.4 days | 20.2 days | 23.4 days | 31.3 days | We haven’t made the progress we wanted on improving our re-let times and the need for social distancing in 2020 means we took decisions to keep people safe that made that even harder. Improving in this area is a priority for us in the coming 12 months. |
| % of customers satisfied that call centre staff were helpful and polite | 95% | NA | NA | 92.7% | 92.1% | Caller satisfaction was introduced in June 2018 with an initial target of 90%. This was set to 95% for 2019/20 which we didn't quite meet. |
| Emergency repairs completed within 24 hours | 100% | 93.95% | 95.60% | 98.90% | 99.70% | The 100% target was narrowly missed this year however, performance has again improved from last year. |
| Appointable repairs completed on time | 100% | 97.19% | 95.84% | 95.20% | 96.20% | We have kept our ambitious target of 100% and our performance against this has improved compared to last year, but there's still work to do. |
| Properties with a valid Gas Safety Certificate | 100% | 99.99% | 99.95% | 100% | 100% | At year end, all One Manchester properties that require a valid Gas Safety Certificate have one. This is an excellent result reflecting the commitment of the team. |
| Properties sold through Right to Buy or Acquire | No target | 113 | 106 | 136 | 104 | We have sold slightly fewer properties this year and are still on target to build over 1000 new properties by 2021. |