Housing Services Neighbourhood and Community Customer Promise

1  Introduction

Everyone needs a place to call home — somewhere that feels safe and secure. We’re proud to be your landlord, and proud of our tenants and the communities we’re part of.

This Neighbourhood and Community Promise explains how we look after the areas we’re responsible for. We work together with tenants, partners, and other organisations to help make our neighbourhoods clean, green, safe, and great places to live. This also helps prevent anti-social behaviour, nuisance problems, and crime.

We also support the well-being of our communities. By working with local people and groups, we aim to build healthier, fairer neighbourhoods with a better quality of life. We help tenants keep their homes by making sure they get the benefits they’re entitled to and supporting them to pay their rent.

This document has been developed with the help of feedback from tenants on our Estates and Communities Panel, Big Community Conversation survey, Tenant Satisfaction Measures survey, tenants’ annual event and tenant drop-in events. 

2  Customer Experience 

We listen, we care: the standards you can expect from us

We strive to deliver excellent customer service and have developed this customer promise, so you know what you can expect from us, and what to do if things don’t go well.  To help us do this we will:

• take time to understand and meet your individual needs
• be open, honest and use clear language in all our communication
• treat you with courtesy, politeness and understanding
• keep your personal data secure and respect your privacy
• give you straightforward and clear advice about the services that are available to you
• measure and monitor our performance against standards. Share performance information with tenant panel members and councillors 
• ask you for your feedback and use this to improve our services
• admit when we are wrong, we say sorry, make every effort to put it right and provide a simple way to complain 
• offer a range of ways we can communicate with each other.  These include letters by post, emails, telephone calls, face to face meetings at your home or in Community Hub.  We have a text message service to keep you updated about your repair appointments.  
• promote our services on the council’s social media pages
• ask you about and understand your needs so we can make reasonable adjustments to tailor our services to suit you
• work with our partners such as the Citizens Advice Bureau, Northumbria Water and Department of Work and Pensions to provide additional support to tenants

How we engage

Our tenant engagement work ensures tenants’ views and suggestions for improving our services are collected on a regular basis through a wide range of events and activities. 

Our aim is to encourage our tenants to get involved in a way they feel comfortable with. Tenants can choose how often they want to get involved, ranging from filling in an occasional survey to joining a group that meets regularly to review a particular aspect of the housing service. Our activities are informal, informative and offer the chance to meet new people and learn more about our housing services. 

It is important to us that we always let participants know the impact of their involvement and what happened to the feedback they gave us. We publicise the results of our engagement activities – what tenants told us, what we did with that feedback and the improvements that leads to. 

Find out more at Our North Tyneside Voice or call 0191 643 2828.

3  Communities and Neighbourhoods 

Making sure that North Tyneside has housing and neighbourhoods that enhances lives, creating neighbourhoods we’re proud to call home. 

We continue to work hard to ensure that all our tenants feel supported.   We will do this by:

• working with you and partners to maintain and improve the appearance of your neighbourhood
• having service standards that set out what our responsibilities are on your estate and what are the responsibilities of others, and level of service you can expect 
• having staff that are visible and accessible on your estate or at your North Tyneside Living accommodation through new tenant contacts, tenancy home visits, carrying out communal block inspections and estate walkabouts
• not tolerating anti-social behaviour, having effective processes to both prevent and deal with this; and making it easy for you to report incidents
• working with our colleagues to ensure our neighbourhoods are clean, green and safe, and places to be proud of, including offering a garden care and garden tool loan scheme 
• tackling empty and derelict properties and driving up standards in the private rented sector
• supporting tenants to sustain their tenancies, including working alongside the Tenancy and Financial Support Team and referring to special support services such as the Citizens Advice Bureau 

4 Your Rent and Other Charges

We provide clear information about your rent charge and service payments. We do this by:

• letting you know how your rent and service charges are calculated each year
• providing information on how your rent and service charges are spent
• providing you with a rent statement when requested 
• offering a range of ways to pay your rent 
• supporting tenants in financial difficulty and helping them to maximise income

5 Your Tenancy

A fair process for letting properties and support to help manage your tenancy, making it easy to understand the allocation and letting process and how we can support you when you’re living in your home.
We do this by:

• providing clear information about how homes are allocated
• providing housing advice to prevent homelessness 
• offering a homeless service and providing emergency temporary accommodation to those most in need 
• offering support and advice to help you manage your tenancy
• providing advice and support to tenants who may wish to move home by either a mutual exchange or transfer
• promoting aids and adaptations that are available to help make life easier in your home
• offering furnished tenancies 

6 What we expect of you 

We want everyone to live their lives peacefully and get on with their neighbours.  Being a good neighbour means being considerate, tolerant and understanding of other people, their behaviour and their different lifestyles, as part of helping to build successful communities together.

Being a good neighbour

• keep noise at a reasonable level during the day.  Speak to your neighbours if you’re planning on doing any noisy activities such as DIY work
• be responsible for the behaviour of visitors to your home (this includes your children’s visitors)
• dispose of your rubbish correctly and make use of the bulky rubbish collection service (two free collections per year per household)
• help us to keep our estates clean and free of rubbish e.g. use litter bins, tell us when they are full, report graffiti, clean up after your dog
• keep your garden tidy, including mowing the grass, removing weeds and rubbish.  If you are elderly or disabled and unable to keep your garden tidy, let us know. We offer free garden care scheme to eligible tenants and a garden tool loan scheme
• if you have a communal area, keep this clear and free from rubbish
• don't allow anyone visiting your home to cause any vandalism or damage in your home or the surrounding area
• be a responsible pet owner

7 Contact Details

8 Consultation

This document has been developed in consultation with our tenant panels.  We wish to extend our thanks to all who contributed to this document