Welcome

For the last ten years, Flagship has successfully delivered high-quality homes and services to those who needed them most across the East of England region. 

Now, in response to challenges both inside and outside our organisation, we’re setting off on a new course with our recently created Strategic Plan. It sets out the purpose and principles that will shape Flagship over the next ten years and beyond.

Our customers and partners have been just as important to us as our own team. Our future depends on forging strong new links with those who can help us realise our vision.

We’ve created this brochure to tell you about the journey so far, where we are today and the direction we’ve chosen for the future. We hope that you enjoy reading it and, when the time is right, we hope that you will join us on our journey.

What we do

Housing management

Housing management, together with care and support, is the core of our business. It comprises services such as repairs and maintenance, income management and rent collection, tenancy management and in-home care for people with special needs.

We provide sheltered housing for the elderly and disabled, as well as schemes for people who have had problems with mental health, learning difficulties, homelessness or alcohol and drugs.

Our private lettings division specialises in letting and managing market-rented properties. We use the income generated to minimise costs and improve our services in other areas.

Care and Support

We aim to provide housing for everyone in the community, including those who need either support or care to manage their homes. They include young people taking up their first tenancy, people with learning difficulties, people with mental health problems and many other groups, including older people who may need both care and support.

Nearly half of Flagship’s staff work in care or support, mostly with older people in sheltered or very sheltered accommodation. We work directly with people with learning difficulties, and we have just begun a new contract to provide floating support to anyone who needs it in the Waveney district of Suffolk.

We also work in partnership with other organisations, mainly in the voluntary sector, who may have specialist skills in supporting our tenants. Our care and support work is concentrated in Norfolk and Suffolk, our stakeholders are primarily Social Services, Supporting People and District Councils. We also liaise with regional planning authorities in the eastern Region.

We currently receive around £4m from our main funders, Social Services and Supporting People. Care and support is fully financially independent within the Flagship Housing Group. 

New housing

We have a substantial development programme, one of the largest in the East of England, aimed towards building new homes to deal with the affordable housing crisis in the region. We are one of only seven regional Housing Corporation Investment Partners and we completed around 1200 new homes during 2007.

Around three-quarters of our new homes are used to provide social housing for rent. Around 40% of these homes are built under our Encompass Partnership for housing associations outside the Group, including Cambridge Housing Society, Chelmer Housing Partnership, Boston Mayflower, Victory Housing Trust and a number of other partners. Working on their behalf, we source and appraise opportunities, purchase land and deliver completed developments.

The rest of our new homes are destined for shared-ownership sale or part-rent-part-buy arrangements. They provide the opportunity for people – including key workers – to take their first steps into property ownership.

We have strong, longstanding relationships with housebuilders, working together to deliver affordable housing, and we are also a major provider of rural housing for local needs. We have undertaken a number of regeneration schemes, including projects such as refurbishing derelict listed buildings or renewing housing estates.

We have a strong track record in sustainable development, delivering environmentally friendly homes with reduced carbon footprints. Examples include our earth-sheltered dwellings at Honingham, which won the RICS’s Sustainability Award for 2006, and our GreenGuage houses at Lingwood, where we are ‘live testing’ a range of renewable energy sources.

As well as growing organically through development, we are also open to options for inorganic growth, and welcome approaches from potential partners who see opportunity in our new Strategic Plan.

Academy

Our Academy provides training for our own staff in key areas such as recruitment, human resources, marketing and health and safety. The Academy plays a vital role in the continuous improvement of our customer service.

The journey so far

The Flagship Group was formed in 1998 by the Peddars Way and Suffolk Heritage Housing Associations. In 2004, we welcomed Kings’ Forest Housing to the Group.

Our development programme has been hugely successful. Year on year, we’ve received the largest grant allocation from the Housing Corporation of any social landlord in our region, and our consistently high management standards have been recognised too.

As well as managing a major programme for our own group members, we are also developing many new homes for our partner RSLs throughout the region. We’ve also extended our care and support services, offering floating in-home support and student accommodation schemes.

The challenge

Around four years ago, we realised that Flagship needed to change. Our housing management system wasn’t working as well as it could, and an inspection by the Audit Commission highlighted areas where we could improve. Even though our performance was still very strong, we knew that we had to face up to these challenges.

The future holds further challenges. The expectations and demands of our customers are evolving all the time. (By ‘customers’ we mean everyone with an interest in our success – tenants, regulators, local authorities, developers, contractors, consultants, care agencies and funders.)

Economic change brings many new pressures, and the fabric of our society is changing too. New construction methods and environmental concerns are changing the way we build and plan. Increasingly, there’s an expectation that we should deliver more value for less cost. And finally, of course, we must continue to maintain our existing properties and build the new homes that people in the East of England so badly need.

Our task is to reshape Flagship into a group that’s ready to meet the housing challenges of the next ten years – and beyond.

New ideas, new approaches

Before we could more forward, we had to accept that the ideas and approaches that had made us successful could not take us any further. So we looked for something new.

We found it in the concepts of systems thinking. Instead of seeing organisations as machines designed for a particular task, systems thinking regards them as more like living things. To survive and prosper, they must learn and evolve. Crucially, they must find a way to relate and adapt to the world around them, as well as meeting their own needs.

Systems thinking was originally pioneered by manufacturing companies who found great success after implementing it. The approaches are used to some extent in healthcare, but hardly at all in housing. What could systems thinking bring to Flagship?

By answering this exciting question, we discovered the key to our future. 

Our purpose and vision

Flagship’s Strategic Plan is the blueprint for our new approach to serving our customers and securing our future.

Systems thinking teaches us that successful organisations look outward, not inward, to find out how to change. That’s why our new Strategic Plan is all about listening to what customers want and responding to their needs.

As a housing management group, our overarching purpose is simple: to create places where people want to live. Within that aim, we want to deliver the best possible service, minimise waste and continue growing.
We want to make sure that we do only those things that matter to customers. We want to solve their problems at the first point of contact whenever we can, and we want to get it right first time. Our vision is that every tenant or buyer of a Flagship home, and every partner who works with us, can expect the very highest standards of service.

We believe that by achieving the highest possible standards of customer service, we can set a new benchmark in housing management. (The Chartered Institute of Housing already refers to our processes in its good practice manuals.) We want to be recognised for the exceptional quality of our service and become a performance exemplar within the housing sector.

Learning and changing

Applying systems thinking means continuously learning about what works and what doesn’t, reducing waste and improving processes.

Over the last three years, we’ve been through a significant learning process that involved staff, customers, board members, contractors and consultants. We reviewed every one of our processes and systems from our customers’ perspective, so we could refocus on what people want from us.

Our review was based on what we now call the Flagship Service System: seven principles that guide all our decisions about the way we approach our work.

• Do what matters to our customers. Instead of imposing standards across the board, we listen to each and every customer and make sure we understand what matters to them as individuals. Different customers want different things from us, and our service must reflect that.
• Get it right at first point of contact. We have empowered frontline staff to make decisions for themselves and meet customer needs as they understand them, unlocking the creativity and initiative already present at every level of our organisation.
• Only do the value work. Our systems have been refocused on work that adds value to our customers, increasing efficiency and reducing waste.
• Minimise handoffs. We know from experience that passing work on to others can cause problems, and that customers like a single point of contact. As far as we can, we make sure problems are dealt with by one person.
• Minimise waste. When we looked at ourselves through customers’ eyes, we saw that our organisational design caused significant waste. We’re trying to strip out this waste, or at least move it away from customer-facing staff.
• Do ‘clean work’ in end-to-end flows. We’ve become more joined-up in the way we work. Instead of managers, staff and partners each doing ‘their bit’ in isolation from others, they’re working together to serve customers better.
• Design against demand. We shape our work to fit customer demands, not the other way around. And we appreciate that demands keep changing, so we will need to keep changing too.

Early in our review, we discovered that three-quarters of what we did failed to add value for customers. By trying to prevent problems that were actually very rare, we’d created processes that were too long and complicated for our customers to deal with. Many of our services didn’t deliver what customers wanted, and we were gauging our success with performance measures that were irrelevant to them.

Three years on, we’ve taken some huge steps forward, slimming down our processes and cutting out waste wherever we can. We’ve remodelled many of our staff roles, moving people from administration to serving customers. Our performance has improved, customer satisfaction is up and costs are down.

However, this is just the beginning. We’re going to keep on reviewing our processes continually – in fact, some are already into their second or third review. For us, improvement will not be a task to be completed and forgotten, but a whole new way of thinking.

Quality of service, quality of life

Our new Strategic Plan is already driving improvement and innovation at the front line. We’re redesigning staff roles, streamlining processes and strengthening relationships to deliver better services and improve quality of life for customers.

Our two Customer Service Centres at Dereham and Framlingham are the first point of contact for customer issues, which are normally communicated to us through a telephone conversation. We’re scaling up the resource and capability at these centres so we can deal with problems as and when they arise, rather than passing them on.

Issues that can’t be resolved by our service centres are passed to our Community Managers, each of whom is responsible for a particular area. They play a very proactive role in building relationships with customers, understanding their needs and the needs of the wider community too. As well as talking to our customers, they also engage in communities through a range of partners including local authorities and voluntary agencies. They aim to improve not only our service but also the quality of life for the wider community.

Uniquely, we design each Community Manager role individually, reflecting the specific needs of each ‘patch’. For example, while one Manager might serve 100 properties in a high-density or deprived urban area where we have difficult issues to deal with, another might be able to manage 400–500 rural properties where service demand is lower.

Our people have always done their best for customers, but our systems didn’t always make it easy for them. Now, we’re giving our staff the authority and freedom to help customers through their own initiative and insight. Our Community Managers and Rangers now have the responsibility not only to deliver services, but to consider how they could be improved as well.

When it comes to housing services, what really matters to customers is a prompt and responsive repair service. To provide it, we’re working much more closely with our contractors. In some cases we’ve deployed our own team members to work in our contractors’ offices, so we can collaborate not just as partners but as a single, integrated team. Through this kind of joined-up service provision, we can continue to improve our front-line services.

Customers themselves can play a part too. Acting on the principle of ‘do what matters to customers’, we aim to treat them as individuals and give them more control and flexibility in terms of our service. For example, they now choose when they want repairs done (instead of us setting an arbitrary deadline), and those who are going to move into a void property can decide for themselves what work is required to it (instead of us applying a fixed standard).

In the area of estate and tenancy management we’re increasing the number of Community Rangers on our estates. The Rangers play an active and much appreciated role, keeping our estates clean, tidy and well maintained. Their work makes a direct contribution to customers’ quality of life.

We’re also improving our management of rent collection, making it easy and convenient for customers to pay through direct debit, or on a weekly or biweekly schedule that better suits their individual circumstances.