Our performance

It’s important that we can demonstrate to our residents, customers and partners that we are properly run and making the best use of our resources.

To ensure that our performance is good and the business is well-run, we use a range of tools to check our progress. This allows us to know when we’re doing a good job and to take action if things need to improve.

Service standards – customer promises

In conjunction with residents we have set targets for our main services which we call our customer promises. They outline the kind of service our customers can expect from us and we review our performance against them. When we do not do as well as we would like, we work with staff and contractors to improve the way we work

Have a look at our customer standards and performance report.

Resident and customer feedback

We pride ourselves in being open to feedback – both good and bad – and we get lots of feedback from residents and customers about their experiences. We bring all of this information together and use a method called the ‘net promoter’ to analyse it. Basically, the ‘net promoter’ provides a score which shows how many people would recommend our service compared to those who would want to complain about the service.

• If you’ve been a customer or resident of East Thames you may be asked to fill in a feedback form after you’ve received a service.
• We do a larger customer survey every 2 years.
• We have a formal complaints process for anyone who is unhappy with the service.
• Sometimes we’ll phone customers and residents to check how it’s all going.

Internal audit

We are responsible for thousands of homes in east London so it’s really important that we understand our obligations and are doing things properly.

Like most large organisations we do everything we can to manage potential risks and as much as possible make sure they don’t happen.

To make sure we are running our business effectively, openly and transparently and ensuring that we are complying with all our legal requirements, we have an internal audit programme.

Our own team checks that our services are being run well but we also get an independent assessment from KPMG each year.

Regulation

East Thames is regulated by the Tenant Services Authority (TSA) and our services are inspected by the Audit Commission. Both bodies are government sponsored agencies.

The TSA is the independent regulator for all affordable housing in England, and their role is to work with landlords and tenants to improve the standard of services for tenants and residents.

We meet regularly with the TSA to provide them with information about how we are performing. On a regular basis we provide the TSA with key performance information; a self assessment which outlines our strengths and weaknesses; and financial information including our annual accounts and long-term financial plan.

Once a year the TSA provides a regulatory judgement of how well East Thames is complying with the standards expected for social landlords and this information is available from the TSA website.

We are also regularly inspected by the Audit Commission to assess how good our services are and whether we can further improve services for residents. Our last inspection was a short notice inspection and it was carried out in November 2009. A small team of inspectors spent three days visiting East Thames and speaking to staff, residents and board members. They looked at only a small number of our services. More information is available on here. To see how we are performing against our action plan, take a look at our performance pages about quality of home and repairs.

In these areas they found we were doing a good job of gas servicing and repairing homes which are ready to be re-let. Our customer care, value for money and how we deliver services fairly were also considered to be fair services.