MuirCroft has existed as a social landlord in the Southampton area since 1971 when it was established by the Rotary Club of Hythe & Waterside. Muir House opened in 1981 as a purpose-built sheltered housing scheme with 43 one bed flats and 9 studio flats. We added our second site, Priest Croft, in 1988 which gave us an additional capacity of 49 one bed flats. Since then we’ve made incremental updates to both properties to make them the modern, pleasant living spaces they are today.
We want to ensure that we continue to provide a great service to our tenants and work ever more closely with them to find out what they’d like us to provide/deliver. We also are looking at other ways of developing the current buildings and land as well as looking at the business as a whole and thinking what other complimentary services can we offer, particularly to those people in our local communities.
Each scheme has an amenity fund which is managed by the tenants. We ask tenants for feedback on repairs we action, and carry out annual satisfaction surveys. We also carry out ad hoc surveys and send out questionnaires when we’re seeking views and opinions, to ensure we are regularly monitoring tenants’ ideas to improve involvement. We have joined TPAS, the tenant engagement experts, to help us improve on tenant involvement.
Staff have regular meetings and all have annual objectives to help achieve our overall objectives set out in the business plan. Staff views are sought in a number of areas and the CEO regularly raises topics through the committee structure and board meetings.
Staff views are sought before new initiatives are undertaken as they have the ‘on the ground’ knowledge of whether ideas are appropriate and what tenants’ views might be.