HOLDING CITY WEST HOMES TO ACCOUNT
Westminster Conservatives are proud that we continue to invest in our council housing programme. We are on track to build more genuinely affordable homes for a generation, with work started on the 1850 new homes we have promised to deliver by 2023.
We want people to be proud to call Westminster their home and support and encourage our strong and vibrant neighbourhoods. Last year City West Homes made changes to its repairs service and brought in a new company.
We acknowledge that customer service standards fell well below the quality our residents expect during the transition. This was unacceptable and we worked with Council officers and the CWH team to turn around the call centre and repair service operations. We don’t deny that it has been very difficult and frustrating for too many CWH tenants and leasees.
That is why we:
• sent in a Council Task Force to help CWH turn the issues around.
• put more people and more resources in to ensure the repair backlog was cleared, that calls were answered quickly and callers’ issues resolved in the first time of asking.
While we have addressed these issues, we recogonise that there is still work to be done to ensure our CWH tenants and leasees receive the service they deserve and pay for. Westminster Conservatives did consider taking the whole of CWH back into the Council.
Having looked at this in detail we concluded that what was needed was to strengthen the senior management team; that team being held to account more strongly by the Council. We have brought in new specialist senior staff whom Council Officers and Councillors are in constant contact ensuring they put customer service at the forefront of everything they do. Now we look to the future and we are currently looking into how we can further improve the service. We are considering how we turn CWH into a delivery service only. That means moving the regeneration teams back into the Council so they can concentrate on building our new homes.
We look at how CWH can concentrate on what they should do best – maintain our existing estates and ensure they serve those who live in them.
Pledge: We will continue to hold CWH to account and ensure their customer and repair servcies are the best in the sector. We will review the whole CWH function and introduce new ways of working to allow CWH to concentrate on serving their tenants and leases.
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