How did we perform in 2013/14?

It’s now been more than three years since East Kent Housing was set up to provide your council housing services to more than 17,000 homes. We continue to perform well in most areas and set out below how we did last year in rent collection,repairs, customer service and re-letting empty homes.

Rents - Even with last year’s major changes to Benefits we managed to work with tenants to get the total amount of rent arrears owed down by more than £150,000 – That’s the third year in a row that arrears have been down and a drop of more than £1/4 million since April 2011.

£ Rent Arrears / 2012/13 / 2013/14 / Target Met?
Canterbury / £296,639 / £240,163 /
Dover / £278,956 / £242,232 /
Shepway / £158,699 / £134,168 /
Thanet / £246,129 / £211,478 /
EKH / £980,423 / £828,041 /

Less rent arrears means there’s more money to invest and we spent nearly £12 million last year on major repairs and improvements like kitchens and bathrooms, and new doors and windows.

Re-letting empty homes - We let 1,123 properties during the year which was 20 more than in 2012/13, although there were 128 more mutual exchanges, many of which were to help people affected by the new bedroom rules to downsize. We exceeded our targets for re-letting empty homes that didn’t need major repair works everywhere except Shepway which was mainly due to the number of long term empty properties coming back into management. *If these are excluded from the calculation the average is about 20 days as it was for Canterbury.

Lettings and Managing Empty Properties Days / 2012/13
(days) / 2013/14
(days) / Target Met?
Canterbury / 26.83 / 20.62 /
Dover / 16.43 / 17.36 /
Shepway / 22.67 / 33.24* /
Thanet / 15.03 / 13.9 /

We also missed our target for re-let times where major work was needed in Dover and Thanet. Both areas were affected by an increase in the number of empty properties due to the number of downsizing transfers. The figures for Dover were also affected by a number of long term empty properties being re-let during the year and in Thanet because a number of tenants transferred to new housing association developments as they came on stream.

Repairs - The change from Morrison to Mears continued to affect repairs performance in the Shepway although things improved during the year which no doubt helped to beat our 97% customer satisfaction target across all areas. More than 98% of the 35,520 repairs appointments made were kept, and this was despite the huge impact of the storms over Christmas when our staff and repairs contractors were working round the clock to deal with major emergency repairs like missing roofing and falling chimneys.

Emergency Repairs Completed on Time (%) / 2012/13
(%) / 2013/14
(%) / Target Met?
Canterbury / 99.91% / 99.91% /
Dover / 95.44% / 100% /
Shepway / 95.99% / 97.09% /
Thanet / 99.88% / 100% /

Although this major effort meant that we still managed to meet our targets for completing emergency repairs some less urgent work inevitably took longer as we dealt with almost 3 times as many repairs as normal. We would like to thank all our tenants who may have had to wait longer than usual for repairs during this time for their patience.

Percentage of all repairs completed on time (%) / Quarter 3 / On Target? / End of year / Target Met?
Canterbury / 98.96% / / 97.66% /
Dover / 96.79% / / 95.89% /
Shepway / 87.32% / / 86.39% /
Thanet / 99.91% / / 99.9% /

There’s always more that can be done to improve our services and we are really grateful to thelocal tenant representatives who have rolled up their sleeves again this year to help us identify the areas we need to change and improve. This year we want to focus on our customer service and making sure we are measuring what’s most important to tenants and leaseholders. If you would like to get involved in helping improve the services you receive check out pages X and X.

What else did we do?

During the year we ran lots of projects to make things betters for tenants and their neighbourhoods. These included:

  • Provided a programme of FREE tenant training and qualifications
  • Provided six young unemployed people secure jobs at East Kent Housing
  • Celebrating tenant involvement at our first Tenant Star Awards
  • Spending over £200,000 on tenant led environmental improvements on local estates
  • Launching the Monty the Money Dog campaign to help with Benefit Changes
  • Started our Can you Click IT campaign to help more tenants get online
  • Set up a new website and local Facebook pages to connect with more tenants