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Our local offers-
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Action plan-
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Our progress so far…
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Work with the fraud initiative to ensure the right tenant is living in the right property
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- We will make arrangements so that you and our staff can easily get in touch and report any abandoned properties or squatting tenants by June 2011.
- We will carry out tenancy checks to ensure that the legal tenant is living in their home and that the property is being looked after. We intend to incorporate this element into our pre tenancy checks and will amend our staff procedure by August 11.
- We will act quickly, effectively and legally to remove unauthorised occupiers. We will be reviewing this policy and procedure by March 12.
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We have come across a small number of incidences where tenants have sub let their home or transferred the tenancy without letting us know. To tackle this we are:
1. Introducing a system on our website for reporting any incidences. We are also supplying information in all the communal areas of our schemes.
2. We are researching how we can validate that a tenant is living at the correct property. Options include using photo ID on Tenancy Agreements and spot checks by housing officers.
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Review our incentive scheme to tenants who under occupy their home to improve effectiveness
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- We will look into providing a number of options to support tenants moving to smaller homes by March 2012. Including, an incentive scheme and financial and practical support for moving and decoration
- We will review our allocations, decant and lettings policy and procedure by March 2012.
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The Government is limiting housing benefit for working age tenants. The changes to the way that Housing Benefit is paid means that we need to identify tenants that are living in a property that is larger than they need and help them to find a smaller, more suitable home.
We have identified which tenants we think are under occupying their homes. We are developing a plan to help tenants move to a more suitably sized home. We will offer support, advice and financial help to assist with moving.
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Increase our supported tenancies by 5% a year
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- We will respond to new development opportunities and to deliver additional supporting people contracts as they become available.
- We will maintain our Quality Assessment Framework (QAF) ‘A’ grades and strive to achieve A grades across all services. The Quality Assessment Framework are the measures that supporting People use to check whether we are delivering a high quality, cost effective service.
- We will review our warden call service by March 2012 and use dispersed alarm services in appropriate schemes.
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- We respond to new contract opportunities offered through the local authority Supporting People commissioners
- We are running a pilot project that enables us to provide support to customers with individual budgets.
- We have a system in place to ensure that our support services are of exceptional quality- we maintain Supporting People ‘A grades’ across all our services.
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Reduce the length of time our properties stand empty.
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We will use a flexible approach to managing empty properties (voids) including:
- Using Choice Based Lettings schemes to reduce the number of first time refusals for homes
- Review void procedures to reduce the time it takes to refurbish empty properties.
- Review and raise our lettable standard by December 2011
- Consider appropriate incentives for low demand properties.
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- We offer Choice Based lettings, which gives new applicants more choice and control during every step of the application process.
- We are reviewing the way that we deal with empty properties so that we can ensure that our homes are let quickly and to a high standard.
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