Great Places Housing Group has maintained its G1/V2 regulatory grades following the recent inspection by the Regulator of Social Housing and received a C2 grade against the new Consumer Standards.
The Regulator found that Great Places demonstrated the effectiveness of its governance arrangements and continues to effectively manage the risks of its activities allowing it to deliver its strategic and charitable objectives.
It also found that Great Places has the financial capacity to deal with a range of adverse scenarios and that its stress testing within its business plan enables it to manage a wide range of risks, including those which sit around its sizeable development and sales programme.
Great Places received a C2 grade against the revised consumer standards, identifying both strengths in service delivery, and a small number of areas for improvement.
The announcement comes just two months after Alison Dean became the new Chief Executive at the Northern-based housing association.
Welcoming the regulatory gradings, Alison said:
We are pleased to retain our G1/V2 gradings which are important to our continued growth and for delivering great services to our customers.
Preparing for the new approach to consumer regulation has given us the opportunity to reflect on where we can make improvements. We have already taken steps towards this by including planned improvements in our recently launched three-year corporate plan named ‘Here For Our Customers‘ and we were able to share our plans with the Regulator during the inspection process.
I would like to thank the Regulator for working with us and I look forward to working with our Board, Leadership team and talented colleagues, to make these changes with the involvement and for the benefit of, our customers.
Great Places operates across 47 local authority areas, primarily across the North West, and Yorkshire. Its greatest number of homes are within Greater Manchester. It owns and manages around 26,000 social housing homes. The majority are general needs and affordable rent properties, with the remainder including Low-Cost Home Ownership and supported housing or housing for older people.
The group employs around 1,000 full time equivalent staff and plans to develop around 4,000 properties over the three years of its Corporate Plan.
