A housing survey that included Powys County Council tenants in Newtown has resulted in a customer improvement plan that has been backed by Powys County Council’s cabinet.
The plan is the council's housing service’s response following a less than glowing independent survey of PCC tenants.
Housing portfolio holder Cllr James Evans said: “The customer first improvement plan which is bought to cabinet comes from the report we had earlier in the year on the Star tenants satisfaction survey, which has had plenty of airing in this chamber and elsewhere.
“There were a number of findings from this survey. The highlight is the repairs and maintenance where we were lacking. And also communication was lacking as well.
“So the service sprang into action straight away, we were not going to sit on this, we were actually dealing with it.”
Cllr Evans went on to say that the plan will be consistently monitored and that he hoped it would lead to PCC having the best housing service in the country.
Cllr Evans added: “We will improve by having better engagement with our tenants to make sure we have better responses to repairs and maintenance.
“I’m very pleased that this has been put in place and I’m sure we will become one of the best housing services in the whole of Wales.”
Corporate director for Economy and Environment Nigel Brinn added: “Just to point out this has been debated in scrutiny.”
In August, the Economy, Residents, Communities and Governance Scrutiny Committee, discussed and was disappointed with the results from the “STAR Tenant Satisfaction Survey.”
The scrutiny committee looked at the improvement plan in October and believed that the plan lacked “evidence” for assumptions made by housing officers.
Throughout Powys PCC has 5,300 tenants.
In April, Cardiff based Beaufort research spoke to 713 PCC tenants in phone interviews spread across the county.
It was followed in May by an in-house telephone survey of 128 tenants as part of a call-back exercise of which there were 57 responses.
The survey showed:
• 65 per-cent overall satisfaction
• 77 per-cent satisfied with quality of the home
• 84 per-cent happy with neighbourhood as a place to live
• 71 per-cent felt rent provides value for money
• 65 per-cent felt service charge provides value for money
• 54 per-cent satisfied with repairs and maintenance
• 47 per-cent fairly or very satisfied that PCC Housing Service Listens to their views and acts on them
• 78 per-cent agree that housing has friendly and approachable staff
• 62 per-cent agree the housing service has a good reputation in their area
• 72 per-cent trust the housing service
By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporting Service