Here at Riverside we’ve always been committed to being open and transparent about our performance.

In this report we’ll set out some of our main performance measures to give you an overview of how we’re getting on.

Performance figures reported are for both Riverside and One Housing Group unless otherwise stated. This means comparisons with last  year’s figures should be made with care, when we published separate reports for Riverside and One Housing Group.

Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs)

The TSMs have been introduced by the Regulator of Social Housing in England to assess how well landlords are doing in providing good quality homes and services. Below are a sample of our latest results.

Overall satisfaction with the service we provide to you - 65.3%

Satisfied with the work we carry out on your property - 70.9%

Satisfied we listen to your views and act on them - 55.7%

Satisfied your home is safe - 74.9%

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

On a quarterly basis, we publish eleven KPIs which tell you more about how we’re performing. These are the indicators that our customers told us they wanted to hear about regularly as they cover the areas that are most important to them.

Complaints give us an opportunity to understand how customers feel about our services and put things right. At Riverside we have 75,000 properties and in 2023/24 we received 10,175 complaints from customers.

Top 5 reasons for complaints

Repairs - 6,735

Tenancy Management (including ASB) - 780

Property Management (including Environmental Services) - 760

Behaviour of staff or Service provider - 600

Property Improvement - 400

We have done extensive work in this area throughout the year to understand the issues our customers are facing and we have implemented a number of improvements. We will continue to focus on the reasons for customer dissatisfaction, seen in summary below, and take action to improve.

• Our communication around complaints needs to improve

complaints are sometimes closed prior to being fully resolved leading customers to feel they have not been listened to or treated with sufficient respect.

• Our timeliness needs to improve

around one in five complaints are not responded to within our target timeframes. This can lead customers to having to chase up responses, increasing the effort required and causing customers to feel disrespected and not listened to.

• There are clear areas of focus

Repairs, as our most frequent service, are naturally the highest area of complaint. Tenancy management, service charges and behaviour of colleagues also lead to a high volume of complaints.

Void repairs - 6p

Central office costs - 9p

Letting homes & tackling anti-social behaviour - 6p

Major repairs - 32p

Routine maintenance - 20p

Salaries - 27p

Each month we’re speaking to our teams and asking: “how have you listened to customers and acted on their feedback?”​ We publish our top five actions that have resulted directly from feedback, either from an individual or group of customers.​

Listening to customers in supported accommodation

We offer supported accommodation for people with complex needs in Hull, called The Crossings. Following feedback from customers to get more involved, we have introduced a monthly newsletter and monthly scheme meetings to share ideas and gather feedback. Customers are actively involved in planning our regular activities and their own events. We’re continuing to work with customers to help encourage more involvement in colleague recruitment and understanding the importance of safety checks in the scheme.

Better building safety information

Customers living in shared blocks like high-rise flats told us they wanted better, clearer information on how to stay safe. So, we’ve introduced posters or, in some cases, digital boards, in our buildings to enhance visibility of this type of information. This all came about through our Residents Building Safety Group which ensures customers have their say on fire safety and other building safety issues. These new measures also ensure we’re complying with the enhanced building safety laws that came into force in the past year.

Making My Riverside AA accessible

As part of our Customer Digital Strategy 2023-26, we recognised that our self-serve channel My Riverside wasn’t adhering to digital accessibility guidelines created by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the main international standards organisation for the internet. While the majority of customers wouldn’t notice this, for those customers with accessible needs and perhaps using assistive technology like screen readers, it was having a negative effect on their experience of our self-serve channel and more importantly an experience that wasn’t equitable with other customers. We commissioned a third-party accessibility audit against the AA (“double A”) standard, which is a legal requirement for public sector bodies, and we worked through a list of 90 changes to ensure we could meet AA requirements. Improvements included new colour contrasts, replacing missing captions, keyboard-friendly navigation, and more. We are now pleased to confirm that the My Riverside portal meets AA accessibility guidelines with the exception of two areas – registration and our third-party repairs diagnostic tool. We have since done further work on these two areas and later in 2024 will release an updated AA accessible registration function and work is underway to pilot our own repairs diagnostic tool that we’ve built in-house.

How to get involved

Your opinion truly matters and helps make a difference. Over the coming months we’re excited to be relaunching our offer for customers to get involved.

"It gives me great pleasure to introduce this year’s Annual Report for Customers. This review of the past 12 months gives us a chance to reflect on our group performance, where we need to improve and of course celebrate our achievements.  I am always so pleased to see the examples of the excellent services colleagues deliver and know everyone at Riverside puts customers at the heart of everything they do.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank colleagues for their hard work, and know this gratitude is echoed by my fellow Board members.

Investing in our homes, particularly tackling damp and mould, has been a top priority at Riverside this past year. We have committed to investing £3m annually to keep our customers safe; to fix existing problems, and upgrade ventilation. We have a new Damp and Mould Policy and all colleagues now complete training on damp and mould, so they know how to identify, report and act upon it.

I am happy to report our customer satisfaction with building safety has increased this year. We have continued a programme to improve safety within customers’ homes and good progress is also being made with fire safety remediation. We have a Long-Term Financial Plan and delivery programme in place for the remediation of cladding on our buildings.

I know many of our customers and communities are still facing financial challenges through the cost-of-living crisis caused by the highest inflation rates in a generation, and rising interest rates. I am pleased that our new annual investment into the Riverside Foundation of £2.5m (which will increase with inflation each year) is having an immediate impact.  We have been able to help over 2000 customers through expanded tenancy sustainment services, such as Money Advice and Helping Hands (a grants offer to help customers facing the most challenging circumstances.). The new money is also being utilised by our communities who are developing their own, local responses to the cost-of-living crisis, such as Can Cook, an innovative food project which gives people essential cooking skills as well as providing low cost, nutritional food.

As in every Annual Report, I am always hugely impressed by the life-changing services provided by Care and Support.  I am always so pleased to see the development of new services and was delighted to see the launch of Op Fortitude, a new service to support veterans facing homelessness.

This year, I am disappointed to say that we have again seen a decline in customer satisfaction levels across a few service areas. We recognise the need for improvement and intend to achieve this change through a new ambitious 3-year Corporate Plan and associated strategies. This includes the new Customer Experience Strategy, which has been developed alongside our valued customers.  I am already seeing the impact of this work, with a new dedicated team looking at complaints to ensure more customers are satisfied with our process and outcomes, and to enable more effective learning from the feedback we receive from customers.  Over the next 12 months, I expect to see even more improvements to benefit our customers, including an enhanced digital offer, and more localised services.

I do hope you enjoy reading this report."

All Riverside performance figures in this report relate to the financial year ending 31 March 2023. They do not include Home Ownership data.

We are disappointed to see that customer satisfaction levels have decreased from last year. We are committed to improving customer satisfaction through the implementation of our new Customer Experience Strategy. We have built this strategy with significant input from our customers and so are confident that it focuses on those areas that matter most to them and uses language that is meaningful to them. This strategy will continue to drive improvement through a dedicated Customer Experience action plan.

To make it easier for our customers to access our services we introduced a new telephony system into our Customer Service Centre which enables us to direct calls to the people best able to deal with their enquiries. We have also made some significant progress in enhancing our digital services to customers; launching a Riverside app and live chat in response to customer demand and building a new digital strategy with our customers that will deliver further improvements over the next 3 years.

Here are some examples of the way we have changed digital services with your input during 2022/23.

Our digital offer

• 36,000 customers are now registered on our self-service digital services, and new customers can now complete their application and tenancy digitally through My Riverside.
• We’ve added the ability for Riverside colleagues, including Customer Service Advisors to log and appoint repairs on behalf of customers fully within Salesforce; removing the need to use complex housing applications and reducing call times for new repairs by 50%.  This provides better and more efficient customer service and frees up valuable advisor time to spend with more customers
• Our colleagues can now also use Salesforce to log shared space repairs on behalf of customers and later this year customers will be able to report repairs themselves through the portal and app without the need to call or email us
• We have also added business processes for Riverside colleagues to record and fully manage Safeguarding and Anti Social Behaviour within Salesforce enabling improved and safer services to customers
• The next year will see greater focus on digital services for customers and will include reviewing payment options and servicing a wider range of enquiries and requests through My Riverside.
  

71% of you are satisfied overall - down 2% compared with 2022

57% think we listen to your views and act upon them - down 1% compared with 2022

We continue to focus on how we deal with complaints to ensure a consistent and effective approach. Following a self-assessment against the Complaint Handling Code, which has been produced by the Housing Ombudsman (the sector body that has an overview of complaints) we have identified further actions that will improve our approach.

These actions will include:

• Developing an agreed approach to how RCVE members support us in identifying improvements around complaint management
• Reviewing our Customer Feedback Procedure.
• Introducing a revised Complaints Policy.

6,633 complaints were received between April 2022 and March 2023

55% of complaints were about repairs

9% of complaints were about tenancy management

8% of complaints were about staff behaviour

5,951 complaints were resolved by local teams at the first stage of our process (90%)

670 complaints were resolved at the second stage of our process

37 complaints were considered by the Housing Ombudsman Service*

*The Housing Ombudsman Service is a Government body that can look independently at a complaint when a landlord and customer have not been able to agree on the outcome. They found that we had acted reasonably on 12 of the complaints, there had been failings in our service on 23 complaints (for example, not responding in time, not providing a full response). There was one successful mediation and one that was considered, after review, to be outside of the jurisdiction of the Housing Ombudsman.

Learning from complaints

Last Financial year 2022/2023 there have been 23 Determinations where there has been a finding of service failure or maladministration by Riverside.

These complaints have resulted in the following improvements.

• Recruitment of additional colleagues.
• Rechargeable repairs working group is represented by all business areas to understand barriers and challenges, and review customers communications.
• Creation of a complaints team to deal with all building safety complaints.
• Building Complaints Governance Team carry out random Quality Assurance of complaints responses and share findings across the complaints community.
• Review of letters to avoid jargon and respond clearly and concisely in Asset Strategy, Delivery, and Evolve.
• Complaint Surgeries have been embedded to specifically review complaint progress and quality of responses to customers.
• Customer videos produced following trend analysis of complaints to educate our customers better in relation to defects.
• Stronger partnership working across Housing Services for complaint handling to ensure complaint responses are thorough and robust.
• Lessons Learnt Forum implemented to understand reasons for complaints and learning we can adopt and share across the group.
• Complaint Handling refresher training delivered to frontline colleagues.
• With the removal of the demographic filter our RCVE panel no longer review or hear complaints. Their role is to scrutinise complaint satisfaction and lessons learnt and to help drive improvements.

Responsive Repairs

Last year, we experienced an increase in the number of repairs being reported by customers. To help meet this demand we employed additional operatives and sub-contractors which meant we were able to complete more repairs than the previous year. This coupled with problems accessing materials and parts meant some repairs took longer to complete than we would like.

This increasing demand, has affected our efforts to improve how we deliver repairs. We will continue to focus our efforts next year on how we can diagnoserepairs more accurately and reduce the time taken to complete repairs from start to finish.

Damp and mould

At the start of the year, we committed to investing £3m to tackle damp and mould in homes to keep customers safe. We used this to fix leaks and prevent water entering properties and to upgrade ventilation to help manage humidity in homes.

We now have a new Damp and Mould Policy which sets out how we will support customers to minimise the risk of damp and mould occurring and make sure we meet our regulatory responsibilities. Everyone who works at Riverside now completes training on damp and mould, how to spot it, report it and act.

New customer information is available on our website and in our ‘Ready for Winter’ information leaflet and we’ve made it easier for customers to request inspections or report a damp and mould repair through My Riverside.

Empty Homes

After completing a pilot for a new Care & Support Empty Homes Standard, we launched it in May 2022 completing more than 3000 properties during the year. Customers tell us they are happy with this improvement.

We’ve also changed how we survey homes when they are empty, introducing new checklists to ensure we deliver a consistent standard across all properties. Another important change is the introduction of a Damp Survey Checklist so we can map any signs of water ingress and fix it before the next customer moves in.

Planned Maintenance and Investment

During 2022 – 23 we spent £75.57 million improving homes.

This included carrying out an upgrade programme to bedrooms in short term supported housing, a programme called SHIPS. The programme modernised and improved 2,184 bedrooms for short term accommodation across 90 schemes, costing just over £4m. We also invested over £6m through our Residential Living Improvement Programme to upgrade communal areas.

We replaced 925 bathrooms, 1,347 kitchens, 1,362 windows and 2,624 boilers as part of our planned maintenance programme to improve customers’ homes. We also installed 354 major adaptations and 1051 minor adaptations to make homes more suitable for customers with specific needs, for example walk in showers, specialist baths, stairlifts and grab rails.

Fire Safety continues to be a top priority and we invested £9.76m to ensure our residents are safe in their homes.

Sustainability

We were successful in securing £12.7m of funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, along with match funding from Riverside this means we are investing £25m to retrofit 1100 homes over the next 18 months. This will improve the thermal efficiency of these properties making them warmer and more cost effective to heat. Planning for this significant project has started and we’ve appointed experienced contractors and consultants to help us deliver it.

We are continuing to use technology to tell us how homes are performing. Over the last year, we have installed an additional 1000 Switchee devices and this information has been very useful. When a property has been at high risk of developing damp and mould, we’ve been able to ask for more information and fix it at an earlier stage. We’ve also been able to identify customers in fuel poverty and provide support to assess and agree how to tackle it.

Building Safety

We are focused on improving the customer experience and undertook a survey to understand how customers feel about the safety of their shared space. The first survey in 2021 tells us what it was like before we implemented new Building Safety inspections and Building Safety Manager roles in our high-rise buildings.

Overall satisfaction

• 2021 - 61% satisified
• 2023 - 70% satisified

Have awareness of what to do in the event of a fire

• 2021 - 77% agree
• 2023 - 80% agree

Know how to raise a concern about building safety

• 2021 - 78% satisified
• 2023 - 83% satisified

Customers satisfied with the safety information they receive for their building

• 2021 - 57% satisified
• 2023 - 59% satisified

We’ve assessed properties against the criteria under the Building Safety Act 2022, registered our buildings with the Building Safety Regulator and started a range of intrusive fire investigations including external wall surveys.

We improved how we manage the risk of fire within shared spaces, including inspecting flat entrance doors and communal fire doors in buildings over 11m/5 storeys. We’ve also introduced an annual communication on fire safety to all customers living in blocks of flats.

We have started a programme to improve safety within customers’ homes ensuring at least one smoke alarm is installed on each floor of a home, and there is a carbon monoxide alarm in any room used as living accommodation which contains a fixed combustion appliance.

Good progress is being made with fire safety remediation, and we have a Long-Term Financial Plan (LTFP) and delivery programme in place for remediation of cladding.

65% of you were satisfied with our repairs service - down 2% compared with last year

66% of you were satisfied that Riverside provides a home that is well-maintained

84.1% of you in 2022/23 were satisfied with your most recent repair carried out - down 1.3% compared with last year

89.4% appointments make and kept as at 31 March 2022 - down 1.5% compared with last year

82% of repairs were fixed at the first attempt - down 0.9% compared with last year

Collecting rent

We continue to support customers through the cost-of-living crisis and our “Let’s Talk Rent” Campaign is enabling this.  Between November 2022 and the end of March 2023 we sent out just over 24k text messages to customers, which helped us to collect over £1.5m of income. We also set up almost 4k new direct debits with customers and over 7k affordable payment arrangements.

The Income Collection team’s focus has moved to prevention and early support. The Money Advice team now sit in the Income Management team along with the Affordable Warmth team to help to identify customers with rent payment issues and support them to meet their priority bills of rent and utilities to sustain their tenancies. We are continuing to support customers during the cost-of-living crisis and providing the advice needed to sustain tenancies and avoid evictions.

The Riverside Foundation

We are committed to investing in added-value activities for individuals and broader communities, whilst delivering measurable positive outcomes. We are inherently committed to being an ethical and social landlord through the Riverside Foundation to deliver a range of initiatives and outcomes which ultimately improve the lives of our customers.

In 2022, The Riverside Group made a £2.5m contribution to the Riverside Foundation, which was one of the pledges made as part of the merger with One Housing Group. This £2.5m will be an annual donation, which will increase with inflation.

This new investment has enabled the Foundation to continue to deliver established services, whilst rapidly scaling up its support for communities, and seeking new ways to help people tackle the cost of living crisis.

During 2022/ 23, Riverside Foundation funding enabled Riverside to deliver projects which:

• Supported 497 people towards employment, delivering 115 people into jobs.
• Delivered £2.5m in cash gains/ savings to people through welfare benefits advice, and £73,119 through affordable warmth advice.
• Helped 126 vulnerable households sustain their tenancies.

The new funding also enabled the development of new partnerships. including:

• Can Cook providing 50 households with affordable ingredients and help to learn how to cook from scratch.
• Tutors United delivering tuition to 156 children in educationally disadvantaged areas.
• Street Doctors facilitating innovative educational sessions with children on knife crime.
• One Academy supplying coaching and vocational training to assist people into employment.

The new funding has also expanded our Helping Hands fund, providing £595,000 in small grants to 2,067 customers in need. This has enabled one-off purchases such as replacing a cooker, providing fuel top-up vouchers, or interview clothing.

We have also been able to introduce a new Community Fund, which has provided over £120,000 to local community groups, providing activities such as food banks, warm hubs, environmental projects and community events.

We work with our supply chain to support social value and responsible business. Our Group Procurement Policy commits to the creation of economic, social and environmental benefits for local communities. Our procurement activities are in line with the requirements of the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012. We encourage our supply chain to provide employment opportunities, work experience, training, volunteering and apprenticeship programmes. We also welcome contributions to the Riverside Foundation.

62% of you are satisfied that Riverside makes a positive contribution to your neighbourhood

2.7% empty homes - 1.4% higher compared to 2022

83.1 days average time taken to re-let our empty properties - 31.3 days higher compared to 2022

5.6% rent arrears as a percentage of total rent due - 0.7% lower than in 2022

Following on from last year’s consultation with customers during the Summer of 2022 Riverside compiled the findings to establish a new Customer Involvement and Engagement strategy. This three-year strategy commenced in April 2023 and has five main themes, Local, Digital, Communications, Diversity and strong customer voice. Our consultation with customers last year identified that they wished to have local involvement and have more face-to-face contact locally, also many people now wish to engage more digitally in a post pandemic environment. We are setting out a framework to encourage more local involvement with our customers and we are working on improving our digital offer.

Riverside Customer Voice Executive (RCVE)

The RCVE continues to represent customers’ views and scrutinises our performance. They joined with colleagues in visiting customers across the country during 2022 as part of our consultation for our new engagement strategy. They also formed a joint working group with customers from One Housing Group to help establish the customer pledges and agree some service principles for the newly merged organisation. The RCVE were consulted on Riverside’s Shared ownership and tenants sales policy and the new corporate plan and Riverside values, as well as helping to shape its Tenant Satisfaction Measures. The RCVE continued to meet regularly via face-to-face meetings and via Teams.

Scrutiny Panel

The Customer Voice Scrutiny Panel completed its long-term project into Riverside’s approach to anti-social behaviour in early 2023. Their recommendations are currently being implemented via an ongoing action plan.

Customer Complaints Panel 

The panel have handled eight customer complaints.

Customer Inspectors

Our Customer Inspectors completed 13 joint inspections last year on retirement living schemes the first since the pandemic. They also held two face-to-face meetings with colleagues.

iCommunity

The iCommunity was consulted on Riverside’s complaints process and customer service principles. It has over 1,300 members.

Care & Support

Riverside Care and Support services continue to offer a menu of local, inclusive and accessible opportunities to customers to be involved in the design and delivery of the service.

These include opportunities such as; involvement in the recruitment and selection of new colleagues and volunteers; service quality audits; local sign up processes and resources, and policy and procedure reviews. Almost all (94%) of services now hold Service Involvement Commitments – pledges made between customers and colleagues in each service around what involvement opportunities are offered, what support (if any) is needed to get involved, and how customers would like to receive feedback on what has happened as a result.

The Co-production Officer has continued to deliver virtual Co-production training sessions and face-to-face workshops to over 300 customers and colleagues across C&S. More than half (65%) of services are now regularly submitting entries to our “Customer Engagement Tracker”. This is used to log engagement events, social activities, instances of consultation, involvement, and co-production. The most popular involvement options are planning the local health and wellbeing offer in Retirement Living, planning service activities in C&S services, tenant/resident associations and/ or house meetings.

Co-production Gurus (otherwise known as COGs) are a network of colleagues and customers across the business who champion Co-production in their area. This year they have been critical in contributing to several projects taking place in the Group. Customers from a diverse range of C&S services were supported to attend virtual meetings around the C&S Strategy 2023-26, Service Charge Statement Design (part of the Group’s Service Charge Customer Mapping Exercise), and Homes For Cathy commitments. The COGs have also co-produced the “menu of involvement” (a guide to various opportunities within local service design and delivery to be involved with) and are currently working on the re-launch of the national C&S newsletter.

Riverside uses the surpluses we generate to re-invest in new and improve existing homes.

Riverside’s headline social housing cost per home has increased significantly in 2022/23 due to a few factors. Firstly, the result includes full year costs for One Housing Group (OHG), whereas the previous year only included the final four months of the financial year. In addition, the challenging external economic environment has driven increases in cost particularly expenditure on materials and energy.

The overall repair cost includes significant fire safety expenditure on tall buildings within the OHG stock portfolio. Excluding OHG, Fire Safety cost reduces cost per home by £720.

All categories of social housing costs have increased. The biggest increases have been in major repairs, £68.1m, which is the equivalent of £995 per home, management costs £29.9m, which is the equivalent of £436 per home, and maintenance, inclusive of planned maintenance, £27.4m, which is the equivalent of £401 per home.

Average cost of managing your home per year

It is anticipated that there will be an increase in cost per home in 2023/24 due to a planned increase in major repairs including fire safety work, demonstrating our commitment to investing money in our housing stock for the benefit of current and future customers.

The figures quoted exclude service charge costs as it is difficult to benchmark Riverside’s cost per home inclusive of service charge cost as there are very few providers with a similar proportion of supported housing and housing for older people.

Riverside is committed to delivering further efficiency by a systematic approach to integration following the merger with OHG and will continue to drive down costs through better working practices and effective procurement without compromising on service standards or quality.

How every £1 of rent is spent

Although Riverside is a nationwide housing association, we know that we need to keep in touch with what is happening locally, and tailor the services we provide in different neighbourhoods. We have talked to customers about local priorities to develop neighbourhood plans.