Flourish Homes tenants got the chance to tell their landlord how to spend annual efficiency savings by a very special ballot.
During a consultation event held at the social housing provider’s Kilver Street offices this week (Wednesday), tenants from Frome, Glastonbury, Street and the surrounding areas gathered to hear about the savings the housing association has to make each year – and played their part in deciding how to reinvest those savings back into Flourish Homes.
Each tenant was handed £10,000 of vouchers from the Bank of Efficiency and given seven choices on which to spend the ‘cash’ by posting the chitties in special ballot boxes. They could split the vouchers between all seven or spend them all in one go on one choice. At the end of the event, the contents of each ballot box were counted to see which had racked up the most ‘cash’ votes.
The choices available were:
- Invest in existing services
- Invest in new services for tenants
- Improve tenants’ homes
- Build new homes
- Pay off bank loans
- Reduce rents
- Other – with tenants given the opportunity to make alternative suggestions
“The government expects public bodies to make efficiency savings every year to ensure they are providing a cost-effective service,” explained Flourish Homes‘s Quality and Assurance Manager Ian Cory who organised the event.
“We are able to invest these savings back into the services we provide to our tenants. So we need to know what our tenants think are the priority areas. The people who live in our homes are at the heart of our business so we try very hard to involve them in the decisions we make about the services we provide for them. Events like this give tenants the chance to have their say and in this case show us what they would like to us to do with the savings we produce over coming years. The outcome of this event will give us information to help plan how we can reinvest savings we make in the future.”
At the end of the event, the top three priority areas identified by tenants were:
- Improving tenants’ homes, by investing in more ‘green’ technology to save energy and the planet
- Building new homes for the next generation
- Investing in existing services, such as getting more tenants involved in deciding the future of their homes and support services like the Mendip Helpline to help the ageing population
During the current financial year, Flourish Homes has a target of £101,000 to make in efficiency gains which it should exceed. The government has set the social housing sector a target of saving £355 million by April 2008 and each housing association is expected to contribute towards hitting this target. Efficiency savings come by constantly examining contracts and services to ensure they provide the best value for money.
