Changing the narrative on safety and compliance

The role of the contractor in compliance has changed beyond recognition – or at least it should have.

Today, we need to look far beyond the numbers – and understand that we’re also here to preserve culture and help landlords tell an authentic story about their role in people’s lives.

It’s not enough to provide 100% compliance by getting through every door to carry out gas and other safety checks. We have a bigger role than that.

Often, we may be a resident’s only face-to-face contact with their landlord in a 12-month period. The way we behave in people’s homes, how we communicate with them in the build-up to and after checks, our processes, and the information we report back to landlords leave a lasting impact on individuals and service delivery.

In a new regulatory era where landlords are judged on perception, we need to ensure our actions and behaviours in communities, online, and in the office reflect the values of the organisations that we work for.

Our role is to keep people safe, but also to build and maintain trusting relationships.

Trust the process 

This starts by making sure we have the right processes in place and that we are operationally sound.

There are legal and contractual obligations for what a contractor must deliver, but this should be the baseline of what we do – not a target.

At Liberty, we begin by prioritising open communication with residents through multiple channels, including letters, texts, and customer check-ins before, during, and after each visit. We also place a QR code on the side of every boiler, giving residents instant access to a customer hub with live chat, support, and other resources.

Our Customer Safety strategy – RESPECT, initially used during the pandemic, ensures we separate work areas, explain each stage of work to the resident and treat people’s homes with care. By delivering on scheduled appointments and respecting residents’ spaces, we drive customer engagement and trust.

We want to make every contact count when we are in people’s homes.

Our team undergoes regular training, from the initial onboarding process to performance reviews, and they take the time to interact and check in with residents while working in their homes.

Liberty has a Red, Amber, Green (RAG) status system that supports the teams to ensure we are prioritising work in the right homes, and we can flag early if there are issues to access properties to carry out checks.

We stay on top of the latest legislation and best practices – in areas like smoke alarms, CO detectors and fire safety to make sure we’re working with landlords well in advance to put the right checks in place and proactively adapt our approach.

Our jeopardy toolkits also help us spot and mitigate risk on every contract we work on, which strengthens our commitment to safety and reliability.

Telling a compelling story

We need to flip the narrative around the work that we do in people’s homes – and that can only be done with collaboration between resident groups, landlords and contractors.

“We need to get into your home because it’s important we are compliant” is not a compelling message for residents.

Instead, we must be clear on the benefits these checks bring to individuals and communities, and the risks if they don’t happen. Gas safety checks play a huge role in keeping people and families safe – they are essentially an MOT on people’s homes.

We need to look beyond telling people what we do and why the work is required, it is important to understand how we make them feel following every interaction with us.

Not only will this improve access rates for contractors going into people’s homes but increase resident satisfaction too.

Our commitment to telling powerful stories on safety and compliance has earned us recognition, including an HPM Award for our gas safety awareness campaign last year and a RoSPA Gold Award for a seventh consecutive year.

Reporting back

The Regulator, The Ombudsman, and just about everyone working in social housing knows that good data leads to better services – and happier residents.

We can provide lots of information to landlords from our visits; the key is making sure that it is accurate and useful information.

This is one of the reasons why we have aligned our Net Promotor Score questions to some of the Tenant Satisfaction Measure questions, included in our surveys. This enables landlords to see a direct link between our work in people’s homes and the wider satisfaction.

This level of transparency is important for landlords when they appoint multiple contractors, to allow them to make informed decisions around which areas are driving up satisfaction and which are having a negative impact.

Compliance has changed. Liberty continues to strive to shape that change to align with our client’s needs.

We’ve listened to feedback from landlords and residents and hear that we have a much bigger role to play in people’s homes and in the sector.

We’ll get behind every door to make sure homes are safe, but also take time to understand residents, treat people with empathy, and feedback on what we find.

That’s how we can make sure that residents live in safe homes while helping landlords tell a story of care, reliability, and respect.