Over three quarters of tenants satisfied

You have been giving us your views in our first ever overall satisfaction survey as Stevenage Homes. According to the survey, more than 3 in every 4 of you (77%) are satisfied with our services.

Although not all organisations have their 2008 results yet, we expect that this will be above the national average for Housing Association and Council housing (69% in 2006) and similar to the average among ALMOs specifically (77% in 2006).

In particular, you said we were good at:

• Housing For You keeping you informed (90%)
• The attitude of workers carrying out repairs (89%)
• Finding staff helpful (85%)
• Keeping dirt and mess to a minimum when carrying out repairs (84%)
• Your neighbourhood as a place to live (83%)

But you also gave us some priorities for improvement. In particular:

• Repairs and maintenance 
• The quality of your homes 
• Taking your views into account
• Dealing with anti-social behaviour

We are working on all of these areas and have already made a number of improvements since the survey, including:

• Offering a better range of repairs appointment times
• Launching an easier to understand set of repairs priorities
• Publishing a new repairs handbook 
• Setting up our Consultation Board – a group of staff and customers who meet regularly to make sure we are keeping to best practice when asking customers for their views 
• Using ‘hotspotting’ to better plan our approach to Anti-social behaviour by identifying where it is highest and which types of it occur in which areas
• Introducing a new ‘Your Neighbourhood’ survey targeted at particular estates and then, where necessary, following up the survey with meetings with residents and the police

We will also be making further improvements in the near future, including making improvements to the quality of homes by carrying out a bigger planned maintenance programme from April and delivering our Decent Homes programme.

This survey was carried out for us by BMG Research between August and October 2008 and covered a sample of our tenants. Over 1,000 of you took part. You can download a copy of BMG's full report by clicking below:

Satisfaction survey report 2008