Welcome from Chair of Operations Committee and Chair of Scrutiny Group
Welcome from Chair of Operations Committee – Sharon Hanbury
The role of our Operations Committee is to ensure Bolton at Home Group provides the best possible services for our tenants and the wider community. It’s been another intense and productive 12-months reviewing our ways of working and taking important steps to improve performance. In a year where our communities have continued facing significant pressures, this activity has been vital.
The committee has provided valuable scrutiny and feedback on Bolton at Home’s quarterly performance reports, its business plan document, as well as various policies and procedures.
A major piece of work in the last 12-months has been preparing for the Regulator of Social Housing’s (RSH) new standards which will offer better protection for our tenants and allow them to have more influence over decision making.
We were also involved in a project to ensure the organisation was ready to comply with new fire safety regulations which came into force in January 2023. We’ve also been busy reviewing various other health, safety, and wellbeing procedures to ensure our customers are protected and supported.
Crucially, the committee continues to work closely with our Scrutiny Group and Resident Voices, enabling our tenants and customers to be consulted and their views to be listened to.
As always, we’ll continue working to ensure lessons are learned and improvements made promptly and consistently.
Darren Kirkland – Chair of Scrutiny Group
This year our Customer Scrutiny Panel has gone from strength to strength as our newer members have grown in confidence and become more familiar with the organisation. Our service review relating to damp and condensation was completed in May 2022 and we made several recommendations, many of which have already been acted upon and are leading to improvements in services for tenants.
Recently we started work on our next service review, focussing on noise and antisocial behaviour. We look forward to seeing how the organisation responds to the findings we made around communication, pets and a new Good Neighbour Guide. Other areas of work have included assessing applications for community grants, reviewing the language and content in customer letters and documents, and giving feedback on key policies.
My time on the Customer Scrutiny Panel has recently come to an end. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported me along the way. I started as a founder member in 2016 and it has been a real privilege to be involved. I have grown so much in confidence and skills. I have enjoyed my work on policy reviews, going out on site to see work in action, working in collaboration with others and the various training courses I have undertaken. I take pride in knowing that my work has resulted in tangible improvements to services for tenants. The work of the Customer Scrutiny Panel has been embraced by staff at Bolton at Home and I hope this continues.