Flagship Housing Group needed readable, informative content to set out their 10-year plan and attract new members.
What does your future hold?
These are challenging times for us all.
Crisis in the financial markets has meant that fewer people can buy a home, increasing demand for affordable housing. Funding is increasingly uncertain, maintaining lending is difficult and securing additional financing a major challenge. Local government reorganisation, regulatory requirements and ongoing economic turmoil only add to the uncertainty.
To sail a rough sea, you need a sound vessel. Flagship Housing Group is already a strong and flexible group, purposely created to grow and develop in the future. We believe we have the vision and the capability to give new partners a sustainable, progressive and productive future.
This prospectus shows why we feel joining Flagship makes such good sense. It explains what we do, how we do it and why we’d like to grow. We hope you find it interesting and useful. And we hope you’ll want to talk to us about where we could go – and what we could achieve – if we got together.
Why join Flagship?
We believe that joining Flagship offers many benefits that simply can’t be found elsewhere.
Our members enjoy stability, robust governance, efficient use of resources, stronger finances and increased customer satisfaction – all in an atmosphere of trust, partnership and mutual learning.
Working together, we learn from each other, sharing local knowledge and housing know-how.
Our staff are recognised and respected housing professionals who thoroughly enjoy their work, resulting in low staff turnover. Our leadership programme encourages individuals to grow and develop within the group. (If you’d like to talk to any of our staff, at any level, just let us know.)
We offer new members a responsive and flexible partnership. If your needs change, our support will change too. And if we don’t deliver, a contractual agreement gives you the option to walk away.
The following pages explain in more detail the strengths we can offer you, as guided by our strategic plan: purpose, service right first time, value for money, stability and certainty. We appreciate the subtle differences between the requirements of local authorities and housing associations who are considering joining a group, and we outline below how Flagship can accommodate both.
Purpose
To create places where people want to live.
Our purpose is applied to every aspect of our business, helping to create and maintain vibrant and integrated communities.
We are well on track to ensure that all our homes comply with the Decent Homes Standard. Through regeneration, we refresh estates by working with the community and delivering against their needs. Our skills in master planning allow us to re-evaluate and rethink the way an entire estate works, delivering improvements including new homes, redesigned car parking areas and the promotion of green spaces.
For new builds, our design brief is regularly reviewed, taking on board both customer feedback from satisfaction surveys and maintenance issues.
We’re committed to working in partnership with all social housing stakeholders: the local community, local authorities, MPs, local business, training providers, social services and health authorities. With the police, we actively participate in crime and disorder partnerships to tackle antisocial behaviour.
By the end of 2009, we aim to have demographically profiled 90% of our customers so we can deliver tailored services that meet their needs more effectively. Our systems have been specifically created to deliver on our customer expectations.
Customer focus
Our vision is to achieve ‘service right first time’.
First and foremost, we take care of the basics: collecting rents, letting properties and addressing problems with neighbours. We provide a community manager for each area – usually, approximately one manager per 500 homes. Our community managers are familiar faces who are well known by customers, not deskbound administrators. Backing them up, our community rangers offer hands-on responses to problems such as rubbish and graffiti. Our high levels of customer satisfaction prove the value of our approach.
We’re focused on doing what matters to customers, not what matters to us. We use the techniques of systems thinking to identify what adds value for customers and minimises waste work. We aim to build flexible, responsive services around the needs of the customer. This is a continuous process of improvement and an integral part of our culture, not a one-off change effort.
Once they’re in their new home, the most important issue for most customers is repairs and maintenance. Our asset management team achieves outstanding results in both planned and responsive maintenance. Most repairs are fixed in a single visit.
In Spring 2009 we launched Flagship Response, the first 24/7 housing contact centre in the country. Open round the clock, 365 days a year Flagship Response deals with all customer enquiries, not just emergencies (unlike other 24-hour service centres).
Value for money
Flagship delivers excellent value for money for group members and customers alike – ‘doing more for less’.
Our rents are more affordable than many of our counterparts’ – and we go much further. By investing in improving existing stock and pushing the boundaries with green technologies in our newly built homes, we reduce customers’ fuel bills. For Flagship, growth and innovation are closely interlinked.
We also aim to ‘design out’ expensive repairs wherever we can, taking lifetime cost of ownership into account. (For example, we install relatively expensive boilers that are more reliable in the long term.) For customers, these savings are just as important as lower rent.
We have one of the highest average SAP ratings in the country, reflecting the impressive thermal efficiency of our homes. We use the EcoHomes XB system to ensure the continued environmental performance of our stock, in line with our ambition to be a achieve exemplar status our sector.
For group members, we offer excellent value for money in terms of lower management costs and efficient central services, with economies of scale that have a real impact on what we can achieve.
We handle procurement on behalf of our members, securing optimum deals on essential purchases such as repairs and maintenance. We also borrow very efficiently, securing more competitive financing terms than a standalone housing association.
With Asset Management and Development controlled by one director, we have a wealth of experience in maximising value from existing assets. Using poor or inappropriately used land, we can provide new homes, green spaces or formal parking areas. We are implementing a group-wide strategy of disposing of properties and land that detract from our core business and/or have high running costs. In agreement with group members and local authorities, we are investing the returns from these disposals in building homes in the community that are easier to maintain and run.
Our approach to stock rationalisation ensures cost-efficient housing management, and our experience proves this provides unit-cost savings across the group.
Stability and certainty
Joining Flagship is an investment, not a gamble. You can trust us with your future.
We are a stable, well-run organisation with a full commitment to local services for local people and a proven growth model.
We offer long-term financial stability and strategic commitment, giving potential partners the confidence that they are working with an established, reputable partner who is committed to their long-term future.
Our group is moving forward with purpose, growing and building new homes. Our development track record speaks for itself, and we have successfully managed three stock transfers to create an integrated and efficiently run housing group.
Our plans are completely open and transparent. There is no hidden agenda for corporate or management reorganisation in the future. Nor do we have any wish to leave East Anglia. Our offices and employees are here, we are accountable to locally based board members.
We operate a compact hierarchy with no multiple layers of management between group members and Flagship management. We all sit round the same table.
Becoming part of Flagship means buying into a sustainable future. You’ll get the support you need to grow and respond to your customers’ needs, retaining independence and playing an active role in the management and direction of the group.
