Making improvements to your home
CGA HomeCare
Here at Community Gateway, we believe everybody deserves a good quality place to live, so we invest in improving your homes, residential blocks and community areas.
What is HomeCare?
Further to Board approval, we adopted the new CGA HomeCare to deliver a new way of investment and repair works. This new approach was taken to reduce the number of visits to our customers’ homes with our aim to survey homes, residential block’s and communal areas to identify improvement and repair works both internally and externally then arranging suitable appointments to complete the works in one visit. The savings we make by doing this together will be invested back into existing properties and new developments.
What improvements have been made so far?
We continue to invest heavily in maintaining and improving your homes and during April 2019 – April 2020 spent over £10.5 million to maintain properties, external spaces and communal areas. We carried out external works to a number of properties (including a roofing programme) and internal works (including kitchen and central heating replacement programmes). We commenced our new HomeCare Repair approach to maintain the quality of homes and to facilitate the delivery of a more targeted investment and repairs services.
We saw 68 newly constructed properties handed over in the first year of our newly adopted approach to the way we manage our assets. CGA HomeCare has proven to be an initial success, however, there is much more work to undertake in the coming years.
Communal Works
We have carried out improvement works to 48 blocks across Deepdale and Grange, both internally and externally resulting is some great outcomes and feedback from our customers and colleagues.
The GreenCare team planted over 400 linear meters of bulbs, hedges and wildflowers to transform plain mowed grass into community gardens. The planting scheme was based on introducing year-long colour from daffodils and cherry blossom flowering in early spring to acers and red robin providing rich autumn and winter colour. Plants were especially selected to support local wildlife such as birds, butterflies and bees and to be tasty and fragrant for residents with strawberries, herbs and lavender included. The evergreen shrubs such as privet and the additional trees will also help to offset carbon emissions in the global action against climate change.
Kitchen Works
The number of kitchen works delivered in 2019/20 was 61, however, when we are in full flow the number of kitchens to be completed each year will be around 320.
Due to the pandemic, we were unable to carry out our HomeCare work, however, the Asset Management team continued to deliver those obligatory services such as gas servicing, emergency repairs and several other compliance associated tasks, keeping our homes and buildings safe.
Following Government guidelines we have reintroduced our HomeCare programme and will be completing specific task risk assessments. Some of the assessments will be more simplistic than others to achieve the measures that will keep our colleagues, customers and the public safe. Longer programmed works inside our customers' homes will be more complex and we will require more time to establish safe systems of work.
We will continue to keep you informed on our HomeCare programme, if you have any questions in the meantime please contact us on 0800 953 0213.