Winter residents meeting 2024

Summary

Winter residents meeting
Monday 9th December 2024

Attended by:

Residents
Yves, Monica, Nat, Ian, Debbie, Brian, Miro, Keisha, Nell, Rich.

Southern Housing
Billy Blankson, estate manager
Norma, our caretaker

Local councillor
Patrick Pinkerton

The meeting

We have had less meetings this year with energy shifting to walkabouts. The walkabouts have been relatively effective in being able to directly raise specific issues, although results are still falling way short of satisfactory. There has also been an increasingly disappointing level of Southern housing presence.

Recurring themes were present at the meeting with main concerns centring on maintenance, failures around reporting/tracking issues and questions around costs.

Updates

We were joined by Billy Blankson, who is about to leave us as estate manager returning to the West London area to continue managing an estate there. Elsa Caldeira will also no longer be our leaseholder manager and is leaving the organisation. Southern Housing will be restructuring and moving estate management to a team who will cover Hackney estates. This is a result of the merger with Optivo and reflects the structure they use. Residents at the meeting raised concerns about this possibly worsening the ongoing problems with jobs not being followed through and information being constantly lost. There were also concerns about further weakening knowledge around estate issues. It was discussed that organising an initial meeting with the new team would be beneficial in terms of the transition and going forward.

Group chair, Rich Holman fed back on his recent meeting with residents from Stamford Hill estate, also managed by Southern Housing. The aim of the meeting was to discuss common issues and share advice and experience of resident led meetings.

We were also joined by our new local councillor for Cazenove, Patrick Pinkerton. He emphasised his availability for assisting with estate issues and is taking a particular interest in fly tipping and antisocial behaviour. You can find his details along with others on the contacts page.

We heard from a resident who recently experienced a worrying incident on the estate at 7am while it was still dark and the estate lighting had not yet come on. She was followed by a man who approached and held her by the arms until she shouted and he ran away. We also heard from one of our older residents, who recently found that somebody had forcibly attempted to enter his flat. Questions around local policing were raised and it was pointed out that the local Cazenove ward panel, with council and police representatives is held periodically in The Boiler House, and is run by a resident on the estate (see contacts page)

We learned that the estate parking management company are looking into installing ANPR cameras and it was mentioned that this could assist with dumping on the estate as the cameras would pick up numberplates of vehicles engaging in fly tipping. This would carry no cost for residents as ticketing would cover the cost.

Recurring themes

The same main issues came up, in particular complaints about maintenance jobs being left without action, even with multiple residents actively reporting, recording and managing the issues and raising formal complaints. This is obviously completely unacceptable.

Some improvement has been reported with service centre communications since Southern Housing brought the reporting system in house, and the addition of allocating case numbers has proved helpful in connecting information.

Many residents have been finding they are unable reach South Housing outside of office hours, meaning there is no emergency response in place for residents. This has been highlighted as a serious and important point for improvement. Among other emergencies, instances of residents being stuck in their own homes, unable to leave when lifts have been out for days at a time have become alarmingly common.

The evergreen topic of damp and mould was raised and a resident shared her frustration in trying to get Southern Housing to take action on this.

It was discussed that Southern Housing seem to be more effectual in executing large contract works but far less so with individual pieces of day-to-day maintenance, leading to a multitude of unnecessarily worsening problems that then need to be repaired or replaced at a higher costs to residents.

There seems to have been some improvement in quality and quantity of work undertaken since the maintenance contract system has changed. AXIS have replaced United Living as the main contractors and Southern Housing are also now able to directly put specific jobs to tender to outside contractors rather than this having to go through United Living.

Ideas

A plan was made to propose Southern housing commits to a series of theme specific walkabouts - maybe four over the course of the next year on the subjects of safety, maintenance, costs and cleaning and push for associated representatives from Southern housing to take a strong role in this.

The idea of connecting to other Southern Housing estates in Hackney is in progress with links so far to Stamford Hill estate, Lewis Gardens and Amhurst Park. If residents know people in other Southern housing estates in Hackney it would be helpful to start conversations with them about connecting.

Our councillor Patrick Pinkerton added some knowledge from his experience of structures within Hackney Councils own estates, where the residents associations have block representatives, and resident group representatives from different estates gather periodically to combine forces to make greater impact.

Next steps

Begin engagement with the new management team.

Start to plan themed walkabouts and contact theme specific Southern Housing representatives.

Look at the possibility of block representatives within the residents group.

Build connections with other Southern Housing Estates in Hackney.