Stonewater is one of the largest social housing providers in the UK, owning and managing over 40,000 homes for more than 93,000 customers. Our core social mission is to provide homes for those who need them most and build foundations for customer’s futures.
As a registered social landlord, we provide safe, affordable housing for people of all ages and backgrounds, driven by a vision of everyone having the opportunity to have a place they can call home.
We offer homes for rent, shared ownership and sale and have specialist housing, retirement and supported living schemes for older and more vulnerable people, domestic abuse refuges, LGBTQ+ Safe Spaces, and young people’s foyers.
Stonewater delivers customer-centred services and maximises value through initiatives that support environmental and social sustainability and minimise our impact on the environment, alongside providing quality homes and neighbourhoods.
Tenant Wellbeing & Engagement
We aim to be a customer-driven organisation by creating relationships built on respect, honesty, transparency, and a commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.
The wellbeing of customers is paramount, and several initiatives support this. These include Specialist Supported Living services for young people and people with mental health needs, Retirement Living services, specialist partner agencies supporting marginalised people in the community and specialist Domestic Abuse services. In 2023-24, around 4,000 people accessed and were supported by these services, with our Domestic Abuse services alone providing 6,500 instances of support.
Our Warm Welcome Wednesday sessions, for instance, welcomed almost 400 customers in 2023-24, and provide communal spaces to help people save on their heating bills while learning more about additional support that’s available to them. Customers could take part in activities to connect with neighbours, stay active while having fun and hear from support agencies.
Alongside varied wellbeing projects, we engage with customers, taking their feedback, thoughts and insight across a wide range of areas, with a dedicated Customer Communications and Engagement team making sure customers’ voices are heard.
Ways to engage and provide feedback come in many forms. Examples include Community Champions, Disability Inclusion Groups, an Ageing Well Board, Complaints Learning Panel, resident associations and mystery shopping, as well as ad-hoc opportunities and petitions.
We run a Customer Hubb, which stands for Help Us Be Better, where a community now consisting of over 1,100 customers can come together to ask questions, give feedback on our services and share advice – a simple, effective way for customers to get involved in a way that suits them.
Our Scrutiny Panel provides a more structured level of feedback, most recently involved in reviewing our approach to managing ASB and improving our communication on rent and service charges. We also introduced the ‘Friends of the Scrutiny Panel’ for those who can offer help but cannot commit as many hours.
Facebook Live events focussing on specific topics such as damp and mould have been viewed thousands of times, while customers are also kept up to date with changes, services and useful information through our online quarterly newsletter and Customer Annual Review.
Due to being a national provider, our team of Mobile Associates carry out scheme inspections and visits to our communities throughout the year, which means we can keep in touch with customers on a more local level too.
Major Projects
At Stonewater, we’ve committed to providing energy efficient homes that contribute towards the Government’s net zero targets, as well as helping the social housing sector lead the decarbonisation agenda. Customers need to live in warm, comfortable, efficient and affordable homes, all of which are linked to the home’s sustainability and quality.
Sustainability and retrofit ambitions have always been high on our agenda – in fact, our campaign to raise the profile of decarbonisation in housing was shortlisted for the PR Week Awards for Public Affairs Campaign of the Year in 2021.
After piloting a retrofit project to ensure it gave the results we expected, our full retrofit programme, using the government’s Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, now sees us working with contractors across the country to install low carbon options. This includes alternative heating systems, such as air and ground source heat pumps, better insulation to walls and roofs, and making use of new smart technology.
We’re currently retrofitting almost 500 homes with a mixture of loft insulation, new windows and doors and air source heat pumps across Herefordshire, Bournemouth, Wiltshire and West Sussex. While in Oxford, 60 homes are being upgraded with solar panels as part of the Energy Superhub Oxford. Once complete, these homes will fully meet our net zero standard.
As one of the largest social housing providers in the country, we see an opportunity not only to improve our own homes but to influence sustainability and best practices in the sector. In 2023, Greenoak Housing Association
became part of the Stonewater Group, combining our resources and a shared passion for sustainability.
Together we launched the Greenoak Centre of Excellence, a central point of shared learning, with an aim to solve climate issues. Focussed on collaboration across the housing sector, customer feedback forms a core part of this project and in tackling the issues we are facing.
Continuing this approach of engaging with customers to increase sustainability and improve homes and financial situations, we also launched a sustainability customer training programme.
We now have 16 customers, some of whom have a passion for sustainability in their personal lives, some who work in the sustainability sector and some who are just keen to find out more, learning together about decarbonisation, what creates greenhouse gases, domestic energy efficiency and the benefit of green spaces to the environment.
Stonewater has also supported two reports by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), most recently a short report titled GreenGo: Unlocking an energy efficiency and clean heat revolution, which sets out how retrofit programmes can solve many of the challenges facing the sector.
This year, we’ve retained our SHIFT Gold Accreditation, an independent sustainability standard, for the third year running. Through our various projects and programmes, we improved our overall score and increased our average EPC ratings alongside the number of existing homes rated above a band C, thanks largely to our retrofit programme.
The Social Housing Act
We welcomed the white paper, as well as the Social Housing Act, as a way of ensuring all housing providers adhere to regulations and remain focussed on customers.
Our job is to deliver continually improving and responsive services directly and through our partners, provide greater accessibility and support using technology, and build and improve more homes.
The last few years have proved challenging for the sector, with tragedies bringing to light stark issues in social housing, combined with increasingly squeezed funding and resources.
However, there are no excuses for customers not being safe in their homes and neighbourhoods, not having their complaints or issues dealt with promptly, and not feeling that their voices are heard. We’ve introduced various initiatives and projects to ensure we truly listen to, and act on, the needs of customers while continuing to provide high-quality new and existing homes.
We recognise that understanding customers and listening in the widest sense is essential to delivering a modern, successful organisation. Making a difference to the lives of communities is why many of us chose to work in the sector, and we want to get it right and make a positive difference – the Social Housing Act will support the sector to do this.
Data Management & AI Software
In many ways, the number and geographic spread of our homes make little difference to our data management – the data is centralised, whether that is our housing management system or our new Azure Data Platform.
Everyone in the sector realises the challenges we face in rising to maintenance issues. We need to be innovative in the way customers can log repairs above reactive notifications into our call centres. Our priority is to make it easier for customers to report repairs – and we’ll soon have an innovative reporting web app to support that as we know 90% of customer usage is on phones.
We then need to move from reactive to proactive, and it’s all about the Internet of Things (IoT). Smart devices and sensors will guide a central platform that will shift how we communicate with customers, and about what, as well as guiding new organisational-wide process change.
In terms of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have some software officially in use, such as Microsoft Copilot; Synthesia AI to produce learning materials; and our Security Operations Centre uses an AI layer over the top of Microsoft Sentinel. Like many across the sector, we’re playing catch-up with our licensing, so only a few colleagues currently have early access to great productivity tools like the AI Notes meeting summariser, but a broader rollout is imminent and will help drive efficiency, productivity and transparency across our nationwide team.
AI will be a crucial factor in any new solutions that we buy or build. We’re currently looking at a new CRM, and the opportunities to integrate AI in customer service are a big part of our considerations.
Key Objectives
Looking ahead, our focus will continue to be on the quality of customers’ homes, whether new or existing. We aim to continue to forge important partnerships in sustainability, technology and service provision – building, improving and leading the way – all to meet our offer of quality homes and services for people whose needs are not met by the open market.
With the Labour government’s housebuilding targets, new homes will inevitably be a continual sector focus, with so many people in need of a good home. Having recently celebrated the development of our 7,000th new home since Stonewater was established in 2015, and the 8,000th on the horizon, we have plans to continue a steady delivery of new homes. Large developments of 100s of homes to smaller sites in rural areas – all with energy efficiency and sustainability as standard – will be vital to solving the national housing crisis.
Customer involvement and engagement continue to be paramount, whether that’s shaping services, understanding how to get the best out of new sustainability measures, or supporting us with new initiatives to ensure they make a difference where it’s needed. Transparency and collaborative working with customers are vital to ensuring we meet and exceed new regulations.
We’ve been given a fantastic opportunity to increase the delivery of new homes and provide a more secure future with the new government’s commitments to social housing. It’s brilliant to see extra funding for the Affordable Homes Programme and while we continue to call for more long-term detail here, we’re hopeful that the ambitions stated so far will enable Stonewater and the sector to invest and plan for a future of more high-quality homes and services for customers and communities.
Article supplied by Nicholas Harris, chief executive at Stonewater.