Johnnie Johnson Housing Prioritise Investment in Essential and Core Services with an Additional £1.8million
For over 50 years, we have prided ourselves on living by our founder’s, Mr James Edgar Johnnie Johnson motto of “be bold, brave and courageous”.
The housing sector has overcome many challenges within this time, and the current challenges which span across the economic, political, and financial landscapes, will no doubt continue to test and challenge the sector and their business plans throughout 2023 and beyond.
Doing what matters most to customers
We launched our ‘Customer First’ programme over 18 months ago, a programme that was committed to doing best, what matters most for our customers; a programme which resulted in us increasing our investment by £500,000 to focus on really knowing our customers, offering more services 24/7, enabling customers to be digital first and employing experts who more importantly add value to customers, day in, day out.
The recently published ‘Better Social Housing Review’ reaffirms our strong vision for the future; our commitment to providing that much needed and valued face to face service, the importance we put on engagement and communication with our residents, listening to you and more importantly taking action to improve the service you receive; and using data to not only drive decisions, but to enhance the proactiveness of everything they do to ensure we continue to provide good quality, safe homes that our residents love to live in.
Chief Executive Officer, Yvonne Castle has today confirmed that whilst our direction is clear and aligns with much welcomed reviews of the sector and regulation, it has meant that the business has had to review their plans and investment for the coming years.
Responding to external challenges
Yvonne says, “Like many other providers we have worked to mitigate the challenges we are all experiencing. The cost-of-living impacts are being felt far and wide for both colleagues and customers and that, coupled with the Government rent cap and rises in inflation and interest rates, has placed us in a position where we have had to re-prioritise our investment in those essential core services, which aim to keep our customers safe and well, ensuring our existing homes are homes that you, as residents are proud of, and love to live in.”
Yvonne goes on to add “Whilst this will be positive news for our residents, it does mean that we will experience some changes internally. For now, we will scale back both our new homes programme and our innovation in digital transformation. We pride ourselves on the fantastic team of people we have here at Johnnie Johnson, a team who have contributed greatly to the success of our wonderful organisation, but for now, we need to regroup and focus once more on doing best, what matters most for residents who live in our homes”.
Continuing to invest in existing homes
The continued investment in our existing homes is vital to us and we are excited to announce that we will be investing an additional £1.8million in key priorities for our residents.
These include, continuing with our fire and building safety programmes, moving forward with our planned work around energy efficiency, the digitisation of independent living call systems and continuing to develop our award winning 24/7 alarm receiving centre Astraline; who are leading the way with the analogue to digital (A2D) switch.
In addition to this, we are pleased to announce our planned maintenance programme will gather pace once again, something which we know our residents will welcome.
With a refined set of priorities and focus on essential and core services, we now look forward to the future to continue and build upon the strong foundations we have put in place and thank each any everyone one of our residents, colleagues and partners for your continued support and contribution.