Life's fairness – or otherwise – is one of the most passionately debated topics in policy and politics. Just look at the public wranglings over welfare reform, from every angle and viewpoint. So when we first looked at rethinking how we managed estate services for Guinness South residents, fairness and consistency were the top reasons to make a change.
The Guinness Trust has been around for a long time. Some of the estates managed by Guinness South have had traditional, estate-based caretaking services for decades, meaning someone lived on or near the site and was on hand to do the communal cleaning, gardening and small maintenance jobs that cropped up.
Yet such a small percentage of the 18,000 homes that we own or manage today had that bespoke service, that it seemed to be doing an injustice to all our other residents. So we had to look for a better way of doing things, an approach that was fair to everyone.
We needed to introduce flexibility into what was previously a very rigid business model. We had to make sure there was cover when a caretaker was on annual leave, or absent due to illness. This is why we're introducing mobile teams – they are intended to be responsive, able to move about across our estates and, working as a team, there should also be enough people to cover absenteeism.
Transparency was another priority in designing this service. We have had some complaints about our services, so we wanted a new service that meant everybody could understand exactly what they were paying for. We needed to tell residents how many hours work a week they were contributing towards, and on what days they could expect to see us at work. From April 2013, this is the service we'll be giving to our residents.
Estate assistants will be completing time sheets and working against a monitored schedule, so we can be confident residents are getting exactly what we tell them. And as the hedges will be so beautifully trimmed, there will be nothing for us to hide behind.
In the past, where our homes did not have estate-based caretakers we supplemented our service with contractors. This just presented us with more inconsistencies and myriad external providers to manage. So bringing all the services in house was one of the more simple decisions we had to make. Now we can be confident that it's a high standard service that they are providing, and one that is easier for us to manage and improve where necessary.
This project has also given us the opportunity to create 24 new jobs locally, five of which have already been filled by our own residents. This is just the sort of opportunity that we've been looking to create to help move some of our unemployed residents into work.
The process hasn't been easy; it has taken two years of planning to get to this stage. We've had to break the news to more than one third of our residents that they've not actually been paying for all the services they've been receiving in previous years and their service charges have now increased. This has inevitably detracted from the positive of being able to reduce the estate service charge for 56% of our residents.
But this service is about fairness. What seems helpful for one may feel like an outrage to another. That said, we've got good moral reasons for the changes we made, and I'm confident that they will result in a better service across the board. You can't say fairer than that.
Andy Mackay is asset management director at Guinness South
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