Our annual Resident conference allows us to have open and honest conversations about our plans and challenges with involved residents and learn from their experiences. Here, you'll find information about the themes discussed at this year's conference.

An overview of this year's conference

More than 50 residents joined us at our annual Resident conference on Saturday 22 June 2024 and shared their views on how we’re doing and helped shape our future strategy.

This year’s conference began with a performance update from our Executive team, discussing our current and future plans.

There was also an interactive Q&A session to hear residents’ thoughts and opinions on our performance and Tenant Satisfaction Measures results.

The conference ended with our Group Board summarising key takeaways from the day.

If you didn’t attend the conference, you can watch the discussion and listen to residents’ questions answered by our executive team members on our YouTube channel.

The themes at this year’s conference

At the conference, residents told us we have the right long-term plans to improve the quality of our homes through our major works programme.

They also said they thought our planned improvements to the systems we use and how we interact with residents would make our services better.

However, they still thought we could do more to help build your trust in us.

To do this, they said we should:

  • improve our day-to-day repairs service through better management of our suppliers and contractors, and better coordination between teams at L&Q
  • improve the way we handle complaints
  • make sure our Neighbourhood Housing Leads can spend more of their time focusing on residents

They also told us that to get all the above right, we need to get better at communicating with residents. 

Our progress and priorities

We’ve made a lot of progress in some important areas since 2021 (when the changes set out in our Future Shape strategy (PDF) began), but we’re clear we need to do more.

Some of the things we are working on are:

  • Improving repairs
    We want you to be able to say: “When you came and repaired something in my home, I knew what to expect, you delivered on my expectations, and I was treated with respect.”

    Progress

    • Since the pandemic, we’ve reduced a backlog of 50,000 repairs to 27,000, despite receiving 4,000 new requests each week
    • Since April 2023, our Repairs Change Project has reduced the time it takes us to deliver day-to-day repairs
    • We’re fixing 76% of day-to-day repairs first time (beating the 75% target we set ourselves). We expect this figure to continue to rise over the coming year – we’re already completing 83% of smaller jobs on our first visit
    • We’ve introduced compulsory training for all colleagues to make sure that they’re accurately recording information about you and your home, which means we can offer you a better coordinated repair service. So far 99.9% of our team has completed the training
    • We’ve also introduced compulsory tone of voice training for all colleagues to make sure we speak and write to you clearly and respectfully. This has been completed by 99% of colleagues

    Priorities

    • We want to further reduce outstanding repairs so we can deliver new repairs more quickly. We’re aiming to have less than 20,000 outstanding repairs by April 2025 
    • We’ve held resident workshops to understand your repairs experiences and are using these to redesign each stage of the repairs process
    • In July, we’re changing the way we decide what works are needed when you ask for a repair, so we can make sure our team have the right tools for the job 
    • We’re changing the roles and responsibilities in our repairs team so that we are managing the repairs process more smoothly
    • We’re reducing the number of contractors we use and changing our contracts to improve the quality of service you receive
    • We’ll build environmental sustainability into all new contracts so that our repair works will help us get closer to Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050
  • Improving complaints handling
    We want you to be able to say: “When I made a complaint, the experience was smooth and better than it had been before. I knew what to expect and you managed my expectations well.”

    Progress

    • We’ve doubled the size of our complaints team so we can respond to your complaints more quickly
    • Since January 2024, we’ve reduced outstanding complaints by more than half
    • More than 300 colleagues completed our new complaint handling training, so they can better support you by understanding and addressing issues you may have
    • We’ve updated the way we manage compensation, so if we get something wrong, you’re compensated fairly based on how you’ve been impacted
    • We’ve improved on acknowledging your complaints a lot quicker. We’re currently acknowledging 90% of complaints by the next working day
    • We’ve also made it a priority to respond to your complaints quickly. Overall, we’re responding to 78% of complaints within time (10 days for stage one and 20 days for stage two). We’re currently responding to 86% of stage one complaints within the 10 days
    • We’ve set up a Complaints Monitoring and Learning Group to help improve our services based on your feedback
       

    Priorities

    • We want to improve day-to-day services, so you don’t have to complain – the most common thing residents complain about is repairs, so we’re focussing our efforts on these (see above)
    • This financial year, we’ll create a new team dedicated to working with our managing agents – they’ll make sure you receive services tailored to your needs and respond to all service charges enquiries
    • We’re reviewing complaints as part of our quality assurance to make sure we deal with complaints fairly and consistently and to make sure any improvements we identify are put into place immediately
  • Investing in Neighbourhood Housing Leads (NHLs)
    We want you to be able to say: “I know who my NHL is, and I can rely on them to help me resolve issues I have with my home”

    Progress

    • Since 2022, we’ve increased the number of colleagues delivering your housing management service by 30% and reduced NHL patch sizes from 1,000 to 550 homes, giving them more focus on fewer homes
    • We’ve halved the average amount of time it takes to resolve queries from residents
    • We’ve created a specialist team to deal with complex issues like antisocial behaviour, fraud, domestic violence and mental health-related issues
    • As a result of this, we’ve reduced the average time it takes to resolve antisocial behaviour by 88%

    Priorities

    • We’re reviewing the number of responsibilities our NHLs currently have – we’ll take out any responsibility that another team in the business can deliver. This will give your NHL more time to support residents in your local community. For example, we're looking at what NHL tasks our caretakers can do on your estates
    • We’re continuing our drive to improve record keeping (see our repairs progress above) so that NHLs always have the correct information about your home to hand
    • By introducing a new, dedicated team to improve the way we work with other managing agents, we’re supporting NHLs to better hold managing agents who deliver services on our behalf to account
    • We’re reviewing the number of homes our NHL teams have per area

Continuing the conversation

Our colleagues who joined residents at the conference have shared the feedback and topics discussed on the day –  and our teams will respond to any specific enquiries. 

We’ll also continue to work closely with involved residents through regular surveys and workshop opportunities to make sure their views are always heard.

If you want to get involved with us, please register your interest.