The changing landscape of priorities for a housing association
Radius Housing Association charts a pathway forward where we protect, enhance and grow our offering, invest in our people, modernise our business to enable the best tenant and customer service.
We have ambitious plans to positively impact on all the communities we serve through empowered teams, collaborating with our customers, partners and one another. At the heart of our plan, in line with the industry and political messaging, is the recognition that we must do more with our existing resources and income and make every penny count.
We are seeking to enhance our customer offering better through: more automation; improved and simplified core tasks; and reduced waste. Starting with the need to enable our most vulnerable to sustain their tenancies.
Specifically, over the next year, we have enhanced plans to empower all our staff to improve processes, eliminate waste and reduce costs while improving our overall service delivery. Starting with an appreciation of existing resources and data and by challenging or simplifying current ‘ways of working,’ we believe there is scope to release significant value back into our business and services. In this way, we can try to protect against funding shortfalls, adverse changes in policy and make provisions for the future needs of our people and homes.
As a responsible social landlord, housing and care provider, we are always seeking to achieve a modest surplus each year to meet the future and in some cases unforeseen liabilities and risks. We are fortunate to have prudent, creative and hard-working colleagues in our organisation and not only can we deal with the challenges ahead and ensure we achieve our goals, in partnership with or tenants Identifying new and creative modes of service delivery, addressing the skills gap through a targeted skills academy and partnerships with market leaders in Britain, technological advancements for building safety and compliance and housing management and wider business improvements.
Our values place our customers at the centre of our organisation. We are committed above all things to ensuring their safety and security and we value their contributions in shaping and enhancing their day to day lives. Together with our business partners we will work seamlessly as a team ‘sharing responsibility and sharing in success’. Everything we do has a plan and purpose and linked to our strategic themes: customer first, great places, empowered people, and assured business.
We seek to deliver high quality customer services and support our tenants and communities will continue, no matter the challenges that are evolving from the changing landscape. has seen an increase in critical fire incidents, especially within sheltered housing schemes. This year, we will have a heightened focus on fire safety. A new cross-directorate working group is developing a Fire Safety Plan to include within its scope:
- a Fire Prevention Strategy with tenant communications and awareness;
- a review of vulnerable tenant evacuation arrangements; and
- additional emergency evacuation signage in apartments.
Post Grenfell, there has been a heightened focus on building safety and compliance within social housing. To modernise our approach, and eliminate the scope for errors, Radius are taking action, this has included the implementation of specialist compliance software to provide effective monitoring and oversight of fire, gas, legionella, asbestos, electrical, and lifts, as well as managing response and remediation cases of damp, condensation, and mould.
We have witnessed an increase in anti-social behaviours across all tenures of housing and this effect is felt most acutely in new developments. The impact is borne greatly by landlords with new build apartment blocks, where the concentration of allocations from the current allocation process can risk creating unsustainable communities. We are glad to be working with our partners on the fundamental review of allocations stakeholder group – led by The Housing Executive. In partnership with our tenants, we have refreshed our approach and produced a toolkit for tackling anti-social behaviours to support the impact of the wider community.
We continue to work on the delivery of our ESG strategy whilst optimising methods of customer engagement on our pathway to net zero, alongside providing high quality homes and support that enables our communities to thrive. We are targeting the commencement of 350+ new homes on site in 2025/2026 (subject to the availability of capital grant for the Social Housing Development Programme and NI Water Connections). This will give us 700-800 new homes under construction by Radius by April 2026.
There is a reinvigorated focus within social housing to enhance the quality of current stock levels and to reduce void levels to create further capacity in temporary and permanent accommodation. Radius have targeted improved ‘change of tenancy’ performance to drive down change of tenancy costs and bring more homes back into use through our Void project leading to improved collaboration with Radius and contracting partners with the aim of having the number of void properties in the next 18 months. We continue to track contractor performance on first-time fixes and ensure the processes for measuring and collecting performance data are robust and being closely monitored.
Housing associations in Northern Ireland offer an incredible social purpose. We in Radius are proud to play our part of that and work as agile as possible to meet the needs of the customer in a challenging but rewarding environment.
