Everyone should have a safe place to live. It is a sentiment that we repeat a lot in our sector, but we must never let it lose its significance.

As a social landlord that owns and manages 24,000 homes across the North West, building safety, or more accurately, people safety is our absolute priority.

Our dedicated building safety team is responsible for 17 high-rise blocks across Salford and Knowsley, three blocks at Joseph Groome Towers in Ellesmere Port, Dock 5 apartments in Ordsall, 11 extra care and sheltered blocks, and 49 mid-rise blocks.

The team is structured to ensure each person takes responsibility for a cluster of high-rise blocks. They each have expert knowledge about the buildings which fall under their remit, their compliance status and they are familiar faces to the people who live there.

One of the team visits each of the blocks daily to check in on things and uses a building safety app, which shares information in real-time, to do daily audits.

The team works closely with compliance and together they achieve high levels of performance around safety compliance. At ForHousing we achieve 100% or close to this across all of the six key priorities when it comes to building safety – fire, gas, electrics , asbestos, water safety, and lift safety.

We are pleased that our tenants rate ForHousing highly when it comes to satisfaction around safety. We are proud to be on track to meet our target this year of 80% of tenants being satisfied that their home is safe.

But we know there is more to do.

Involving tenants has always been part of our culture, but the recently introduced tenant satisfaction measures have just given us a greater drive to do so. It’s another opportunity for us to listen to tenants and act on their views.

As part of our commitment to this, we have created our own Tenant Charter as part of the National Housing Federation’s Together with Tenants initiative.

Tenants have told us safety is one of their priorities and it’s ours too. They also wanted to see communication from us focused on the issues that matter to them – so we are.

We believe our effective engagement with tenants on building safety is crucial to driving up tenant satisfaction. We are committed to listening to people’s feedback and improving wherever we can.

Open lines of communication

We want every tenant to feel safe in their home and confident that when they do raise an issue action will be taken. To achieve this, we believe creating open lines of communication that give tenants a variety of ways to get in touch and to raise their views, is crucial.

Our new Raise It initiative is a fresh approach to scrutiny and it encourages tenants to do just that. To raise the issues that matter most to them.

We provide a range of opportunities for tenants to access key safety information and for them to raise safety concerns with us. These include:

• One-to-one chats with their dedicated building safety officer or with one of the customer liaison officers on the team
• Visits focused on building safety with every new tenant a few weeks after they move in
• Tenant building safety forums run quarterly and take place in five different locations
• Tenant inspections of the blocks
• Signage in every building, which is regularly updated
• Regular drop-in sessions
• Community meetings.

It is rare that we receive feedback around safety concerns, which is really positive. But, it is so important that we have a range of mechanisms for people to have their say and for them to know we’ll act on it. We’re always looking for opportunities to improve, that’s why we’re also looking to pilot new solutions such as a compliance portal that tenants can access to view the compliance information relating to their home. This will ensure that tenants feel safe in their homes.

Honesty and accountability

We must ensure every single person who lives in a ForHousing home is safe, knows that any concerns they have will be taken seriously, and swift action taken.

Our ForHousing values are respect, trust, openness and passion. To truly live them, we have to be honest about where we haven’t got things right and what we’re doing to improve, we have to be open to all feedback and we have to ensure tenants know that they are heard and respected.

Nothing is more important to everyone at ForHousing than tenant safety and by working hand-in-hand with tenants we can keep improving. People’s safety will always be our number one priority.