Another year has gone by, another set of figures submitted, collated and analyzed, all thanks to your efforts in benchmarking on your ASB statistics and to the work of HouseMark bringing these figures together to produce the annual report.
As you all know HouseMark ASB Benchmarking is the only cross-sector wide tool for social landlords to measure ASB across the UK. Now with over 200 members HouseMark are able to capture the success of housing professionals and their associations through individuals submitted and uploading PI’s throughout the year.
It is always interesting to see the trends that occur and appear over the years; this year is the fourth report to be issued with more uploads than ever. Social landlords are recording more cases each month than last year, with increasingly large caseloads, we are sure that this will continue to grow with greater emphasis on reporting and evidencing work.
Having said that, ReACT are really pleased that we gathered additional data from 22 of our customers as well as the uploads, which allowed HouseMark, for the first time ever, to record results on early interventions and evaluate what actions taken are more successful at that stage – thank you once again to all those whose data was used to collate these useful results.
We hope that we can continue to collate the success of early interventions from our customers and perhaps a whole range ReACT fields in the future to enable more effective benchmarking across the country. We will be working with HouseMark to develop this over the coming months and of course we will keep you all updated.
ReACT’s Early Intervention Statistics
ReACT users now represent the largest group of HouseMark members that use a specific ASB case management system. This allowed a realistic comparison between providers on the case details below.
Early intervention actions were:
- interview (39%),
- letters (31%),
- case monitoring (20%)
- face-to-face contact (9%)
On average, ReACT users logged 5 actions over 9 days to resolve a case, with very little variance in the dataset. This indicated that ReACT users are likely to following tried and tested actions, allowing them to rapidly close the case. Further analysis showed that early interventions, followed by mediation and police referrals proved to be the most successful options to resolve the complaint.
It is worth noting that the resolution rate for different types of ASB varied considerably, from 65% for prostitution to 99% for litter. As a rule of thumb, environmental types of ASB had much higher resolution rates than personal ASB, with an overall average of 89%.
Back to a brief look over the entire report which is available to download here. Having looked at early intervention and its success, we can’t dismiss the outcomes of the growing number of cases practitioners are handling; the number of cases being resolved has risen around 10% since last year.
With an increasing emphasis on value for money, members can gain a realistic idea of what ASB costs (currently £331,000 per organisation) and ways to bring it down. The benchmarking service also ties in with the new Respect Charter, allowing housing providers to demonstrate their commitment to service and gaining value for money.
ReACT remains the only software provider to offer the Benchmarking automated Upload link and as you know, we will be working on developing a wider range of fields to report on through ReACT to get an even better snapshot of what is being done across the UK when dealing with ASB.
Recent Government announcements this year have already indicated that the use of ASB data will grow, with the arrival of the NSIR vulnerability definitions and the Risk Assessment Matrix, which both have been adopted and developed in ReACT’s latest version. Alongside the increase in reporting, social landlords are also expected to share more information (at a faster rate) with other agencies such as the police and social services – we want to work with our customers to ensure that the multi agency work is being reflected and evidenced for these future reports – multiple companies can be set up to allow for joint working and reporting. Speak to one of our team at 0121 384 2513 for more information
Watch the video
ReACT also hosted a webinar with HouseMark two weeks ago, looking at the benchmarking results and discussing future changes to the report. You can view it for free at: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/438575966
By Kate Hill
The ReACT Blog 