Thrive – HomePlan

Thrive Homes owns and manages over 5,500 homes throughout Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire delivering much-needed homes for social and affordable rent, intermediate rent, leasehold, shared ownership and private market rent (through Thrive Places). Thrive is focused on increasing housing availability and affordability in one of the most expensive parts of the UK.

What is HomePlan?

Achieving a fair deal for residents is a key focus at Thrive. Stemming from this objective we launched the Thrive Deal. This was a ‘whole system change’ to renew our relationship with our residents and with this, we launched our annual HomePlan visits for all our tenants to ensure we keep homes up to a good standard, and better understand the individual needs of our residents.

HomePlan is an annual visit with a resident in their home using an inventory style report. These visits are a way of strengthening our relationship with residents, while providing the opportunity to assess the condition of the home, recommend repairs before they become urgent, and look at possible improvements to the quality of the home. It is also an opportunity to ensure our data about the resident is up to date. This all results in an improved level of service delivery.

Prior to launching HomePlan in 2019/20, we piloted the approach with 182 void properties (around 4% of our total rented homes). Post-launch, our target was to complete a HomePlan visit with just over 25% of our tenants, prioritised for the most vulnerable and any new residents during that time. This was completed by our Neighbourhood team and initial inventory inspections took up to three hours to complete. During the pilot, this was streamlined and reduced to one hour per visit. Training was provided for colleagues undertaking these visits to ensure consistency. In 2021, we established a dedicated HomePlan team, recognising that making it part of a wider role did not enable sufficient focus on the visits. Key activities of this team include:

• Confirming and updating resident details.
• Completion of an inventory of the property.
• Reporting of non-emergency repairs so that they can be booked into a single visit.
• Reviewing of tenancy management and tenancy sustainment issues specific to individual residents.

The team were also trained to report any communal or estate issues that need to be addressed. Moving forward, the aim is to connect HomePlan with our Stock Conditioning Survey (SCS) programme, so that every five years the annual visit is a more detailed SCS and residents don’t receive two similar visits in one year.

As an internal initiative, the planning and decision-making stage included reports to internal stakeholders, our Customer Experience Panel (CEP) and Board. Members of our CEP volunteered to be involved in the pilot before this was rolled out to the wider resident base. Once finalised, we engaged with the Three Rivers District Community Safety Partnership to identify our most vulnerable residents, who were then put on a priority list. Now that the programme is embedded, engagement is limited to internal teams and residents, and we have developed a video to explain the benefits of  HomePlan.

Challenges

Scaling up HomePlan from a pilot group to all tenants was always going to be a challenge. It was clear from the outset that it would need to be rolled out over a period of five years to ensure we had the internal resources and systems in place to complete the visits and for our repairs team to manage the repairs and enquiries logged as a result.

However, after the launch in 2019/20 the COVID-19 pandemic meant we were no longer able to meet our residents in person. The team quickly came up with our virtual HomePlan programme. This meant contacting residents by phone or video call if they were able to accommodate this. The result of this quick thinking has had a long-term impact as it created our streamlined ‘HomePlan lite’, which is now an option for residents to take up every other year. We are now part way through our fourth year of HomePlan and are continually reviewing the programme to adapt to challenges along the way, for example:

• 15% no access rates: we are looking at ways to improve this by working in partnership with our Compliance Team linking HomePlan with gas and electrical safety checks.
• Resourcing for repairs: we have recently run a pilot to see how this could be better managed after a visit. Lessons from it will be shared across the wider programme in 2024/25.
• Limited capabilities of our existing IT systems: we have a digital transformation project starting in 2025 to improve our ability to capture inventory style reports, photos and appointments in our housing management system.

Impact

Overall, those residents with a HomePlan are generally more satisfied with Thrive as a landlord (81%) compared to others (76%) and it is easy to see why:

• More repairs are being picked up during a visit, which removes the need for them to call our Contact Centre.
• We can book multiple repairs into one follow-on appointment, which is efficient and appreciated by both our engineers and our customers alike.
• Key safety and damp and mould issues are identified at an early stage more often, increasing the possibility for early intervention and preventing further issues.

Overall, we are seeing a drop in repairs being reported at HomePlan year on year. There is an average of five repairs reported at the first visit, and less than two in subsequent visits. The visits also provide us with insight into how residents are living in their homes and any support they might need to manage and sustain their tenancy. We are now looking at a risk-based model for HomePlan, rather than an annual visit, that prioritises the wellbeing of our residents based on a matrix that weights:

• Frequency of resident contacts (low or high incoming contacts)
• declared health conditions.
• Age and household makeup (prioritising those who are living alone).
• Outstanding customer actions from previous HomePlan.
• If the home is heated by electricity, so we don’t see them for an annual gas safety check.

We now ‘make every visit count’ by capturing key information, such as damp and mould or customer vulnerabilities at all repairs and tenancy visits. Deploying HomePlan where there is the greatest need and to ensure a more detailed visit happens in between each SCS. It has been difficult to determine the value for money of this project. There is undoubtedly a cost in providing it. However, there are a wide range of benefits that will support business efficiency and provide evidence for meeting the new Consumer Standards.

Lessons learned

Rolling out a programme like HomePlan is resource intensive but worth the effort. Key lessons are:

• Ensure you have a dedicated team for this type of initiative.
• Consider what data will be collected and how it will be stored and used.
• Ensure appropriate training for the team to maintain consistency.
• Improve access rates by communicating the benefits and purpose of what you are trying to do to residents. Establish how you will determine value for money at the outset.

If you would like to discuss this further with someone at Thrive, please contact Jo Barrett.