Our accountability survey: your feedback

In August last year, we asked you to complete a survey looking at our accountability. A big thank you to everyone who took part – our Customer Scrutiny Panel (CSP) were able to use your feedback as part of their scrutiny review.

The in-depth review looked at ‘How do we ensure that we provide customers with access to the right information, to be able to hold us to account?’ This is consistent with the topic of ‘transparency’, which is outlined in the new Consumer Standard themes and Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs).

The CSP looked at over 1,496 pieces of both direct and in-direct customer and staff feedback as well as analysing over 10,000 pieces of customer data. They also conducted research into the Social Housing White Paper, TSMs and subject access requests, and carried out website reviews of other housing associations.

Their findings were presented to a group of our senior managers to help us understand what improvements we need to make to ensure our customers can hold us to account.

Your feedback

Your feedback told us:

• You want to receive information about our performance, specifically; customer satisfaction, the number of building safety checks completed, average call-wait times for the Hub, the number of complaints received and number of calls answered by the Hub
• It’s important for us to communicate gaps in performance, so you can hold us to account for how we’ve performed in line with our service standards
• You view other organisations’ performance information when it's relevant to you, or when you have a service dissatisfaction. In the same way, you want to be able to view our performance information
• There are mechanisms to hold us to account however, you feel we make it harder to do this than other organisations
• There is uncertainty about where to go to find information to hold us to account.

What happens next

Based on your feedback and other data they reviewed, the CSP made some recommendations to enhance our accountability and ensure transparency.

They suggested that we:

• Publish a defined framework for delivering transparency and accountability, focusing on what accountability means and what information we will provide to customers
• Develop and implement an approach for sharing information, to include proactively sharing this at the point of contact with customers when it could be relevant to them
• Make sure all operational staff understand this new approach, so we embed a culture of being transparent and sharing information
• Create a separate subgroup, who will solely focus on customers who are digitally excluded.

The recommendations from the CSP will be put into a detailed action plan which our ‘My Impact’ group will oversee, to make sure that we’re putting changes into practice and demonstrating the impact of these changes.

If you have any questions about the accountability survey and our action plan going forward, please contact our Customer Scrutiny team on customerscrutiny@midlandheart.org.uk

If you would like to become an involved customer and take part in these sorts of projects, you can find out more information here.