East Lothian Housing Association (ELHA) launched elha.com - its innovative 'on-line housing office', which illustrates how housing association services may be provided in the future.
The innovative approach sees a housing association providing 100% of its services on-line, with staff available on-line during the day to deal with enquiries in real time, using the website's unique 'chat' feature.
All key services, including applying for housing, repairs reporting, paying rent, viewing repairs history and getting on-line rent statements, are available 24-hours a day. Any enquiry can be dealt with during the day when the on-line housing office is open.
ELHA's housing allocation service has been available on the Internet for several years, and now over 70% of all applications for housing are made on-line. This success has prompted the Association to go one step further and place all its services on-line.
As well as access to services, the website contains a host of information relating to obtaining and managing a tenancy with ELHA. Tenants can even go paper-free and choose to receive their newsletters, rent consultation documents and annual rent statements by e-mail instead of post.
'Talking' websites are set to make life easier for more than 4,000 tenants and potential tenants across Shropshire. The new websites are part of a series of communications improvements launched by Shropshire Housing Group.
The Group, which was created in 2007, includes South Shropshire Housing Association, Meres and Mosses Housing Association and the maintenance and repairs organisation, Total Response Ltd - each of which now has its own web site.
Accessibility was the key priority, with the target of ensuring that all our tenants who have access to computers would be able to access services easily.
Those who find reading difficult can make use of the free Browsealoud service on each of the sites. They can choose what language they wish to be read to and can also customize the voices and the page layout and text size.
The new websites also make it easy for people to apply for rental, shared ownership or equity mortgage property throughout Shropshire.
Total Response delivers plumbing, electrical, decorating and home improvement services - both within the Group and to private clients. Their services can be viewed and accessed on line.
United House won the Quality in Construction Award for Excellence in the use of ICT for its Islington housing programme - FLAG.
United House was commended for FLAG, an innovative process management system to help handle its increasing workload. It is a bespoke real time management system designed to integrate the many strands which go into a refurbishment project.
This has allowed United House to manage a Decent Homes order book worth over £200 million and contracts to bring 50,000 homes up to standard by 2010.
FLAG was developed in response to a £153 million PFI contract, undertaken by United House for Islington Council. This is the largest and most complex street property refurbishment ever undertaken in the UK with living conditions of over 20,000 Islington residents improved. Work is scheduled to be completed in 2010.
FLAG is the first process management system for social housing to be developed by a contractor. It tracks the progress of work property-to-property. It automatically generates and personalizes standard letters and makes appointments, synchronized with the pre-agreed target programme
The system then formulates the works process from start to finish for each property, generating a works order and programme from the survey data. A simple 'traffic light' system prioritises actions to ensure full compliance; work cannot start until the project literally gets the green light.
