Season 4 episode 1 – December 2023

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

Mark, thank you very much for joining me today to record this podcast. So this is about your work at Coastline on damp and mould. But first of all, would you like to introduce yourself? So who are you? What you do at what do you do at Coastline? Yeah, thank you very much for inviting me. Very pleased to be here. So I'm Mark England, I'm the head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline. That's the job that's sort of changed and it's evolved over the years, but I previously managed all the maintenance here that sometimes and have worked my way sort of through various different aspects of the jobs. So I've got a lot of background in our sort of approach to damp, mould, insulation, ventilation systems and keeping our stock in really good condition.

Mark England, Head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline

So at Coastline as a social housing landlord, he seems to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to damp and mould. Were you already quite active in looking at addressing damp and mould? When original Spotlight report, report on damper mode came out back in 2021, I believe it was, yeah. So just prior to that coming out, we already started doing surveys about some of our customers. So what we tend to do was look at our CRM systems and customer relationship management systems and our repair systems. And we tended to do some sort of sort of interrogation of those to look at damp and mould. And, and we then sent surveys to customers within certain areas, so certain groups of homes asking them to report back if they had an example or mould or any concerns with their home.

And that could be simple things like that. They realise that the fan wasn't working anymore. We had a case where we put some external wall insulation on our house and, and that fan clearly wasn't working the way it should be because we covered the, the grill up. So there were lots of sort of things that we'd already been doing. We'd, we'd also sort of from that, we've started to build a bit more of a strategy towards how we could manage damp and mould in homes. Cornwall is a really damp atmosphere most of the time. So it is quite difficult of area I think to  work in. So we needed to know and understand it's not gonna go away. So it's better that we go hunting, if you like, go finding out where these issues might be. It basically would use the information from the damper mould surveys, use a specialist contractor. They were going to their homes and from a very early stage, so quite a number of years ago, we were already doing wipe down, washed down to balls, giving customers advice, guidance. And then we started looking at how we can make that a little bit better. We do the follow up surveys then around the four to six weeks after the work was completed, just to make sure that actually we've dealt with the issue and sometimes we hadn't.

Sometimes, you know, some things have come back and we need to sort of deal with those again. But also we did find out sometimes that customers have turned their fans off because they thought the user which electricity or maybe they were a bit noisy. So that's a little bit of a challenge. So it's that sort of education process and understanding people's perspectives and their sort of fears. So we sort of moved along then and overs probably four years we'd carried out and it was 19176 mile down to conversation surveys using the specialist, which is a significant investment. We've got 5000 homes, you know, that's 2/5 of the stock from that around sort of 17 or 1800 fan services or repairs and all the replacements of some of the fans. We did find quite a number of fans actually that were broken. So they need to be fixed and necessarily being reported.

We also found some gaps in our services where we have some specific builds where when we fit a new kitchens, you would have to change the glazing to put a fan in because you couldn't put a hole through the wall. And they're Cornish units. So we found that actually some of those have been missed over the periods of time which replaced the kitchen, but not put the fan and the and the glazed unit in for various reasons. But yeah, we carried out I think up to somewhere around August to November 2020, we've done around 500 customers that we had sent those proactive surveys to and then we did about another 140 or so in 2021 and around the same in 2022. So we started with quite a big cluster and then we started holding it on the properties where we knew there were definitely issues with some of the other properties. So they felt like the hotspots to go to next.

I think the other part I would add is we did also sort of start to uncover a little bit more about some of our customers, their anxieties, hardships where they needed a bit more support, mental health and well-being. And you know, as you move into the sort of COVID time that that was all sort of quite an anxious time for everybody. So again, damp and mould didn't feel probably very it's sort of important to some people at that time. But we continued sort of with our process and making sure we visited those properties.   Thank you, Mark. So, um, when the original spotlight report on damper mode came out, what did you do with the information that we provided and those recommendations did? Were you already on top of all of those or did you self assess against them? How how did you, how did you take that report? What did you do with it? Yes. So basically took the documents and we assessed ourselves against as a quite large sort of frontline management team. We assessed ourselves and said, you know, where could we do better? Where were the gaps? How do you sort of find your silences? How do you find those sort of little silos of properties maybe that, you know, it was a very small cluster of properties.

We need to sort of just pick those up because they won't necessarily come through on survey data and, and, and just the assessment of ourselves really, really brutally honest against those indicators and the recommendations that created a plan for us. And then we can start to think about, so how are we going to deliver this properly? We've done a really quite good job for a long time, but actually it's this time now the, the bar has been raised. So we need to change things. So we created then a ventilation standard and a ventilation strategy just to sort of make sure we're embedded things. And we started to talk to customer groups an awful lot more as well. Our customers have got a, a scrutiny, a set of scrutiny teams that they can pull together. And we, we got them to look at the, the ombudsman's report and said, you know, this is what we think we are, this is how we think we score. Do you think we're, we're good or bad or, you know, where can we improve? And they took that whole process right the way through. And you know, we've got to be grateful. We've got a really good group of customers, not a huge number of people, but a really good group who won't hold back and they tell you how things really that's really important.

Amazing that you're engaging with the with residents and those you couldn't customers as well to get their that honest opinion. It's hard to assess yourself against something when you've perhaps written the policy, you've written the plan or the strategy. It's good to have that that different viewpoint and have that criticism so you can pull out the point, learning points and change that for going forward. So you've already talked a little bit about finding your silence. We've talked about riding your silence within the spotlight on Tamper mode report. How did you find your silence? How are you still doing this and what has worked well with regards to the approach that you've taken?

Yeah, so it's very multiple angles and, you know, and it does a lot of it pivots around, you know, educating a lot of our colleagues to make sure that when they're visiting customers in their homes that they do flag things back to us and just report them. If they've got a concern with downpour mould or just the internal environment, maybe hoarding issues or something else, then then that could lead on to other sort of ventilation problems, turning off fans, not heating their homes properly. So we, we used that sort of colleague network, if you like, on a day-to-day basis. So people are reporting things back also our contractors, we spoke to our contractors and said, we do need you to tell us. We need to understand what's going on. And you know, the, the heating contractors, if they're going to properties and they realise that maybe it's an oil fired boiler and they realise it's actually not being used very much, they can tell that when they're servicing it. So they may report that back to us and say, actually, we we're not sure that actually the heating systems being used as best it could, that whole empowering sort of like colleagues, you know, we, we looked at that and tried to sort of resolve things before the complaints process.

But we also reviewed our complaints process and took it from a, a sort of three stage process to a two stage. And then introduce sort of more of a service failure sort of approach for colleagues who found something first time said actually this, this doesn't feel like a fair set of circumstances. So there may be a gesture of goodwill. We like to do something small payment or, or maybe we just, you know, get the ventilation team in or, or, or deal with some other issues that are there. And I think that complaints process is, is a really useful tool, but if you try to stick rigidly to a three stage process, if you like, then actually you tend to disempower the people who notice things very first who could have just resolved it there. And then, you know, rather than sort of leading things up a process, because it's a process that's been put in place.

And I think, you know, we've tended to to talk an awful lot around sort of customers about refusing work. And we see some sort of issues where customers don't report repairs. Something that we've done for quite a long time is so we run reports where it would identify customers who haven't reported a repair for two years. At one point we used to do that. We used to look at look back three years, but actually it wasn't that many. So we scaled that to two years and then we could cross reference that with our known heart to access homes. We could look at a little bit of information from our gas servicing contractor who would say, yeah, this property is always quite difficult to get in. We do have a few concerns there. There's a bit of vulnerability. So that allows us just sort of really cool quick glance, we can look at when the properties that haven't sort of raised the repair for two years because it's highly unlikely there isn't a single repair in lots of properties. And then we would sort of do a little bit more sort of research, talk to our other colleagues and tenancy management, customer services. They've all got wealth of knowledge. They all know individuals, they all know certain people who maybe have some vulnerabilities. And we knew then we could sort of look at those and and speak to them. But sometimes it's just about door knocking and sometimes it's about going visiting and making sure everything's OK.

We also sort of looked across, I think in the 12 month period we've prior to be considered contacted around sort of 60 customers who we felt would sort of very vulnerable and they would more than likely have had a house visits just to have a chat through just to make sure everything as well. So I think that's, you know, it is that communication point and it is the sort of the whole sort of embracing sort of the community to a certain extent and using your ears and listening about what people are saying. And but who's not telling you anything at all because that they really sort of vulnerable.

Yeah, I know there's a few landlords who put on perhaps like a summer fate for their for their residents. And it gives them that opportunity to speak to the residents. And, and some of the residents that's like their big Family Day out. They've got like donkey rides there and things like that. And all of the staff from that landlord organisation goes. So it's like you're perhaps speaking to people that you wouldn't hear from necessarily. Or another landlord that we've spoken to. They one day, one morning a week, each member of staff would go out into the, the communities that, where they have homes and they're just visible doing things like litter picking and gardening just so they can be visible and, and, and then residents know that they're going to be there and they can come up and, and talk to them. So it's, it's great that you're doing that proactive that almost a big door knock, but not quite a big door knock.   Yeah, we have other activities that go on sort of similar vein. But you know, we have things like we used to call them skip amnesty days. But the days when we would send a team out to a specific area and we want people to clear their gardens of bits of rubbish and things. And if they've got stuff they've been hoarding or hanging onto in their property, maybe in the loft or whatever, then let's get it out. And if you don't really want it, let's get rid of it for you. Do that in a responsible way.

We have our own recycling facility, so we can recycle everything and do some good and it really helps customers and we continue to do that quite regularly through the year now.

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

Amazing. And so you undertook some work with the University of Exeter on a project called the Smartline project. Would you be able to tell us a little bit about that project?

Mark England, Head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline

Yes, so smart one was really very unique. It's a collaboration which the University of Exeter actually headed up with the coastline Homes. So that was our properties and our customers Cornwall Council were involved in volunteer Cornwall and local volunteer organisation and we basically put technology in 300 homes. And at the same time we started having conversations around sort of guided conversation about the customers health, their well-being, what they aspired to, what they would like to do, what they felt was the best things about living in one of our homes and what was not so good, what they felt thought, you know, was challenging maybe. And that whole collaboration, you know, we looked at neighbourhoods, we improved some neighbourhoods, we did lots of tree planting. We have a, a really active group here in some of our sheltered bungalows. And, you know, they were out there and they wanted to set up, they wanted to get some extra funding they which they got from a parish council or the town council. I think it was so, so they were really active and yeah, a really, really useful project from a damp or mould perspective, we could see that we developed with the university of actually, we needed to be able to visualise the data. We need to be able to look at it and say, you know, this, this property is the worst, this one's not performing as well as this one and start to do some comparisons.

So we, we sort of collaborated together and built a dashboard. It was our dashboard. We, we built it or the university built it using their IT guys and, and that allowed us to basically sort the data by property of which one's got the highest humidity and which room. It's simple stuff to click, but also meant you could look at carbon dioxide levels in rooms. And so that may be to do with having lots of pets or aquarium tanks. It could be a whole set of things. So maybe over occupation or high occupation of a property or particularly in a room. So if you have high carbon dioxide in just the lounge and not in the bedroom or vice versa, then that person is probably all those people are probably using one of those rooms a lot more than another. And that could be an indication of fuel poverty, you know, and they tend to be not heating their home as well. You cross reference that with the, the temperature information and it gives you a completely different picture of what's going on in the in the home.

But Smartline was, yeah, quite a clever sort of project in that we had a group of researchers in the background and they are very independent group of people who would just take data, analyse it and say this is what it says. It's telling us that this is what happens in this type of home with this age of customer and, and lots of other sort of dynamics. But also we, we've got lots of case studies on the Smartline website so that you'll be able to see and yeah, there are instances where people are just turn the heating off in really cold conditions. And we had two coordinators at Coastline who basically sort of coordinated everyday and talked to customers on the Smartline project and they're chat through things they noticed on the dashboard to say they're just temperatures little bit lower today in your home. Have you turned the heating down or is there something else going on? And that whole like customer care sort of side, but it was the first of our real technology projects. We have used tech in the past. We used some digital hygrometers that used to leaving people's homes, customers homes, and we could collect those and take the data off those and then look at the profile of humidity and temperature and things. But this was the big, big project to be fair. And, and it certainly has allowed the publication of a lot of independent research papers and there's lots of case studies and there's loads of information there around how mould is, how the, the likelihood of mould temperature and humidity information, information around sort of like customers wants really and house in certain circumstances, some customers don't mind having low temperature. And, and actually we have some, we have some properties where one particular property that springs to mind was high humidity with the low temperature. And it was always like that. And that sort of caused us a little bit of anxiety because we need to understand why that is.

And it was interesting because there there's customers had two huge dogs, so they couldn't turn the temperature up. Yeah, they humidity levels were always going to be a little bit higher than a home of similar sort of size because those big dogs breathe and the garage and the rain and they do all the things. And so it's, it's like having four adults really in that home. So we fitted at a positive pressure ventilation unit in that property and that got rid of the whole issue with the humidity and the temperature wasn't really affected. So the customers were delighted, brilliant. That's sort of links into that knowing you're stuck and knowing your residence as well. And I think you just started to touch on some of the actions that you are taking to tackle dumper mould. What actions are you taking that are particularly working well in your homes? OK, so we tend to, we carry out a full survey of the property and that's really important. You need to understand completely what you're dealing with. And so we tend to then we brought a lot of the service in house there. So we don't use an external company as much. We still use them from time to time, but we're building sort of our own sort of in-house resource, which are makes things slightly easier for us to manage as much as anything else. But it's important when that diagnosis is done to understand whether it's moisture coming into the property from a leak externally or leaking the roof or something in the cavity rather than, you know, the actual sort of the occupation of the property, a lack of ventilation or the fan failing or actually just the way the property is behaving. It requires a bit of additional ventilation, say the example with the, the two large dogs are and their residents. So we can fit in a positive pressure ventilation systems. They, they work very well, positive input ventilation peers, their nicknames and we've had sort of about 3 or maybe 400 of these installed over the last probably four years or five years now. And they work very, very well. They help also we have some radon in some of our homes. So they definitely have a positive effect on radon levels as well. So we get a sort of another benefit from that and the customers benefit of course.

But I think the whole area of like the sensors and the technology is, is quite interesting. And we've now just recently introduced using technology in homes. And if you think of the technology as they're just two small sensors and they're like a first aid kit. So the customer now rings in and says, I've got some issues. I sort of we'll book a surveyor, one of our own surveyors to go and have a look. They can pop the two sensors in the home and then immediately we're on street and then lot with live information about the temperature. Humidity, carbon dioxide levels in the home, in those two locations in the property. And once we can watch that, we can see exactly what's going on. We then go back to the property and carry out the works that are required. So we do the remedial works. Those sensors will show us where, how successful that's going to be. Or maybe it's not quite sufficient. So we might have to do some more work afterwards, but at least we'll know you can't beat the data.

The data is so sort of like honest and it may feel way better, but it might not be right where you want it to be. And so using the tech and that that's really seems to be working really well. And we've also now partnered up with another company and they're sort of starting to send some little nudges out. So this is our newest thing if you like. So they're going to use WhatsApp is literally starting at the moment and they'll send some nudges out to customers to say actually today is the humidity outside it's quite low. So this is a good day to ventilate your home. And, you know, if the weather's good, then that's good. You know, it's a good time to ventilate. So we're trying to do that, but also perhaps pushing some positive messages out of saying this is really great. Your humidity has dropped over the last seven days, so that's really good. And your temperature seems to be keep staying fairly even. We've not worked the whole messaging out. There are experts at what they do, and we're going to soften the language and make sure that it's, yeah, it's easily understood.

But I think that's important and trying to keep that constant stream of sort of communication and when people get things right and things are improving, give them a little nudge to say well done. That's really good. And not been that coastline says, you know, some patronising way, you know, ohh, well done. It's a well done. You know, it's we all appreciate that. It can be quite difficult. So, you know, we, we want to sort of reward people for doing things that that are right.  And you might not necessarily know as a homeowner, what are the humidity levels like? And it's just giving them the information that they need and, and knowing what would benefit the property because I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know at all.

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

So, yeah, that sounds amazing. And be interested to find out in a few months’ time how that's going Mark.

Mark England, Head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline

That's it. Yeah. Yeah, we'll do, we'll pull together a case study because we tend to pull case studies together most of these sorts of projects. And I think we'll publish it. It's all open.

I will send some sort of publications out to explain what we've been doing and how it's worked and whether it hasn't. Something's don't work. You just have to accept that and move on to the next thing and try to, you know, communicate with your customers and find out why things don't work. That's really important. If you don't try, you'll never know.  Yeah.   And so we released earlier this year our follow-up report on the damp and mould report. Was there anything in that report that surprised you?    That's all. I think as much as anything else, I think that somewhere around the 40% of landlords   did not really make any changes and that seems to be disappointing if I'm honest. I think it, it's not, it's not easy. This whole process is not easy and anyone thinks it is probably isn't doing enough maybe, or I've got fantastic homes, maybe, I don't know. But I think, you know, what we found is the more open we've become, we're far more open to conversations. We tend to ask customers more. We're not afraid of people, you know, telling us they've got damp and mould issues. What I'm afraid of trying to deal with them. We're not afraid of failing to deal with them and then having another go and doing something else. So it just seems sort of dismissive, doesn't it really that 40 years at 41% of the landlords had not made any changes at that point. And, and actually, you just need to to improve and just work your way through a plan, consult with your customers. You know, I think, you know, if you don't consult or you don't by the right information to customers, it doesn't feel like the right culture at all. It feels like, you know, that, that you're not that bothered. And, and there's a huge social value in social housing. And we've got to express that value and, and make sure that we live those our own corporate values, but also look after customers and we house some of the most vulnerable people in the country. And you know, we do need to help them. And so I think it's disappointing.

I think there were some comments in there about sort of lack of engagement of landlords, but I think there was also landlords who said they had a lack of engagement from customers. And maybe again, perhaps it's just about trying a little bit harder. Perhaps it's a bit of a cultural shock across an organisation where this is your damp and mould isn't, isn't my problem and it's, it's not my boss's problem. It's everybody's problem. We need to deal with this and we need to get on with it. And if I see it in the property, then I take on board and, and I want to report that back. I want to get it fixed. And sometimes that's really difficult, and sometimes it's difficult conversations and sometimes it's really expensive, but that's the way it is. And I think, you know, the faster that people sort of embrace this whole process and get on with it, the better for everybody.

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

So do you have any advice then for landlords who are looking to improve in the area of damper mould?

Mark England, Head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline

I think probably the biggest point is almost repeating myself a little bit is this is not easy, this is quite tricky and being proactive is so important and looking for the next thing. What's the next thing we can do? How do we unpick the next little action points? Sending out the surveys was one of our early days sort of actions, sending those little quick surveys to customers and say, Yep, fan broken bathroom, you know, everything else seems to be OK. Not notice any mould that's fine, 4 clicks or six clicks and send it back to us.  But I think, you know, you've got to sort of accept that you're going to get quite a lot of reports once you become good at communicating, that's the sort of the payback is you get a lot more people get in contact with you and that openness then and you have to accept that. So be prepared. It's properly probably top of the list, but keep communicating, get the customers to have it. Look, get your, your staff teams to sort of to report things back, raise the bar a little bit and actually say the this is not, not, you know, something you can I more, if you don't feel happy with the property, just flag it back. It's something we could jointly sort of deal with. And so I think it is just about being that really sort of open on ice. But you know, coastline, we were saying that accountability and you know, if you go to a property, you should be accountable for what you've seen and try to then deal with it. But follow that through. It's not, it's not necessarily enough just to e-mail someone and say, Oh, no, just a bit of motivation. Someone in someone's house, make sure the work order gets placed. Make sure you find out if the same surveyor went and what did he find, how did they get fixed? That's all knowledge, and that knowledge across an organisation is so, so valuable. I think that, you know, as you go through that process, I think it, it links in with other things, stock condition surveys, the housing health and safety rating system, how you embed that in your stock condition surveys, how many properties are visited. We do some things called community standard inspections, lots of housing associations through those where they look at the communal areas, but at the same time knock on a few doors, have a chat with people. Maybe they're the people who don't have or haven't reported their repair for the last two years, maybe because they're on that list, you know, that I talked about earlier. Maybe they're just someone who's moved in very recently. Maybe it's the first time they've they've had their own home. It could be a young sort of parents with, with a child or something. It is worth just knocking on the door. So in Coastline, how's it all going? I think having that conversation is so, so important. Yeah, there are lots and lots of tricky situations out there and I think you have to sometimes confront them and sort of absorb what people take, tell you and listen and then sort of take it to the right people to make sure those things can get resolved.  Something else that we did really was we brought our stock condition survey in house.

So I think in terms of other associations, if they thinking of, they're looking at stock condition surveys, I think you'll find and you know, I've been in this organisation of the 23 1/2 years and, and we always had independent stock condition surveys. That's how we used to operate. It was the norm. And we've, I think a lot of housing associations have done the same. They're moving away from that now. So, you know, having your own team means that you can start adding specifics into that survey, like the damp and the mould and how big, what's the patch? You won't get that from a, you know, generally stock condition surveys, we can get that from them. Perhaps the head of the conversation go, did you have any sort of other sort of concerns about vulnerability? Did you notice any hoarding? Did you look at the cook has been used? There's, there's conversation pieces as you're walking around? There's a real ownership. I think then certainly helped our stock condition surveys have been fantastic. They raised their own repairs, you know, so when they, they go to a property, they, they can do those online on the, on the tablet. So they can raise a repair there and then and say to the customer, I've just raised that for you. So that should get fixed. And it's, it's a 20 day priority or whatever the priority might be.

So I think there's a lot more value and I think there's a lot more social value within having your own in-house stock condition surveyors. And I think that's really important.  Great way of, um, supporting those who are not digitally enabled or perhaps English isn't their first language or whatever other issues they're met. There might be a great way of doing that and being really proactive.  All sorts of so other sort of challenges here, dyslexia, inability to read or write, you know, that there's lots of other things that might be going on that that keep people sort of much quieter and keep them out of contact.

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

Yeah, thank you, Mark. So we are obviously the housing ombudsman, we deal with housing complaints. So my next question to you, my final question is how do you guys at Coastline learn from complaints and what is the impact of the way that you learn from complaints?

What is the impact of that on your organisation and what is the impact of that on the residents as well?

Mark England, Head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline

Yeah, I think it probably come across that we're really open. So this is not about challenging people. This is about sort of having a positive culture across the whole organisation that actually complaints, you know, the old adages their opportunities than they are. I mean there are opportunities for someone to feed back to us that actually I don't like the way that that is done. I much prefer this. I don't like waiting four months for a repair that I think you should have done last week. Yeah, within a week, whatever that complaint might be, you need to take the value at it and would look at it and just be honest and just say actually, yeah, I think I'd be quite concerned if I had to wait that amount of time for that to be fixed. So why did that happen? Like what was the process or the customer wasn't aimed for 3/3 of the visits. So and then we didn't have an engineer on that particular day, so we couldn't, there's all those things. So you start to get some sort of some information back, a little bit of intelligence, then you can say actually, so we could do change this process slightly, having those sort of text forwards and things, you know, for the repairs, which we use just to make sure that they do know we're coming today, tomorrow. Is that a good period of time to notify them? So dealing with complaints is, is, is really pivotal. I think it's really important. And having a sort of no blame culture I think goes hand in hand with that. And just making sure that everybody are on board. We use a set of our commitments for our customers. And, and we tend to look at that sort of from the point of view of we ask our colleagues if they come across instances that they didn't think were quite fairly handled, then they put forward what they found and what they think should happen. And not always, you won't always have the answer, but if it's flagged to you that actually I noticed this and it feels a bit unfair, but that's, that's good feedback because there will be someone in the organisation, a team of group who will look at it and say, actually, yeah, we could change that.

Similarly, why have we done it like that? Or we've done that for 20 years, or perhaps we ought to change it then we have to make that slightly different. So I think, yeah, that whole learning process is really, really important. We take those actions, we have them then collated. We report those right the way through to our board. Our board understand exactly how the complaints process works. And they look at how many complaints were getting, what areas that their complaints are coming in and, and how they're resolved and whether the result first time, whether they escalated through stage one and stage two, and then what the general outcomes are. We use gestures of goodwill. We do do some of that. We've got just the goodwill payments. And we'll also some sometimes do things for customers that that maybe some other organisations would say are we wouldn't do that. But which is fine. It's just that's our culture. We, we like to surround, fix things and we don't just close anything down. Our complaints are, are, are kept open until they're fully resolved. And then once they're fully resolved, we will actually close them out. And we do like to measure the time that's taken. And sometimes that can be various months if some complaints aren't as simple as sort of two letters backwards and forwards. Today it's all fixed. They're a lot more complicated. There's a sequence of other things that might need to happen that might be around finances, it may be about property and repairs or the heating system or something else. So  the temptation is to try to set a target set. All complaints have to be closed in, in six days or something. And actually that's probably not achievable. And generally you won't have resolved everything within those six days in any case. So it sort of feels like you're always kidding yourself though. Look how good we are. It's a KPI for KPI sake. There could be wrong. We have KPI's, we have targets and our system is set up with all of those to remind us to make sure that we, we keep everything on track, but taking slightly longer to, to resolve the complaint, but staying in communication with the customer regularly, making sure they understand what's going on. It's, you know, it's how it has to work sometimes and it's something, something's take longer than others.

So it's so important having that communication, isn't it? And the resident feeling like you haven't forgotten about them and that you're being proactive in dealing with something.  They're living with their day-to-day. They've got, you know, they can't go home and get away from the issue. They're living there. So that communication is really important. Yeah, I think the other thing is that that whole  our customer scrutiny teams having scrutiny team unpick a, a process up, it's really, really useful. They're feedback or just their questions after they've had a read through it and they sort of have that sort of open forum conversation and sort of why, why does it take that long? How does this work? What why does it take so long to buy one of those bits? I thought that was easy thing to buy. And actually sometimes they're quite difficult. And if it's a heating related, just as an example, then temporary heaters may not be the perfect solution, but that's what they we need to do. And actually that's an additional cost for testing potentially for that customer because it might not be as efficient as their existing heating. We might have done that just to the poor time for them, but they actually didn't. He was struggling slightly financially. And so we should look at how, how do we cover the cost of those because we want to make sure you're heating your home while we deal with your heating system. So it's all those bits that we need to sort of pick those up and unpick them and just be honest about it all and, and get things fixed. It's so important.

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

Yeah. Thank you, Mark. Well, thank you very much for your time and, uh, thank you very much for letting me grill you on all things damp and mould. It's been lovely speaking with you today.

So, any final words before we wrap up?

Mark England, Head of Innovation, Sustainability and Procurement at Coastline

I think the biggest thing for me is open the doors, let it all happen, get out there, find out what you've got to find out how many properties. Encourage those customers to report every instance of damp, mould, whatever it might be. And once you've got them then you can start to deal with them. Well, you don't know what's going on then it's really difficult and you're not building that open relationship. And, and that's so important. Use the customer scrutiny team. If you haven't got them, pull one together, get a group of people and say, oh, your job is to critique your way through this process because we, that's how we operate at the moment. Is that the best way? And, and they will definitely tell you whether you're doing the things in the right order, in the right way or not.

Victoria King , Sector Learning and Development Lead

And that is so useful.  Brilliant. Thank you very much, Mark.  Thank you.