On 1 April 2022 we completed our two-year integration programme following the merger with Equity Housing Group, achieving our goal of creating a new, ambitious organisation that combines the values and balance sheets of the two legacy organisations.
The rationale for merger was clear. As a bigger and stronger business we can build and maintain more homes, offer improved and more efficient customer services and continue to deliver on our profit-for-purpose work across our regions.
The first year of our integration programme, from April 2020, saw us put essential building blocks in place as we successfully established one business from a legal and regulatory perspective, aligned senior leadership and integrated our central services and systems.
We also co-created our new GREATER Together culture for our new organisation, focused on our behavioural pillars of Growing, Respectful, Empowering, Achieving, Trusted, Excelling and Reputable.
This was all co-ordinated through our Programme Management Office – and accomplished despite the difficult and uncertain backdrop of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
With a solid platform in place to build on, the second and final year of our integration programme, from April 2021 to 31 March 2022, marked a focus primarily on our customer-facing services.
This culminated in a successful ‘One Business’ go live which launched the consistent operation of services across the new Great Places Group from April 2022. There were many strands of this complex transformation work including the launch of our new housing management system, Aareon; new team structures and roles; new and updated processes in several parts of the business; an integrated customer contact service in our customer Hub; and a new telephony solution for Plumlife.
The intensive work that took place throughout 2021-2022 to help us achieve our one business goal, and the collective efforts delivered throughout the different areas of the business during this time, are covered within the relevant sections of this Annual Report.
In the build-up to our One Business go-live on 4 April it was decided that Great Places would have four regions that encompass all of our stock, instead of the five that existed previously.
As part of this work we took the opportunity to review existing patches/regional footprints and aligned the repairs regions as closely as possible to Neighbourhoods.
The new regions are:
The Equity legacy stock was incorporated into the new regions. Patches were reviewed within each region, with input from our Heads of Neighbourhoods, to ensure local knowledge and geographical variations were taken into account.
Much of the work in the run-up to go-live was around preparing to launch our enhanced digital offer, facilitated by our new systems. We have now gone live with:
Already in 2022/23 we have gone live with our new website, which provides a much improved customer experience, and we will soon launch a new customer app. We will continue to provide better and more modern ways for customers to access our services if they choose, such as digital self serve. Evolving and enhancing our customer offer will also be a priority, for instance by offering improved functionality around the repairs element of MyPlace.
Although we are strengthening our digital offer for those customers that embrace it, we recognise that there is a balance to be achieved. We work hard to ensure that our colleagues are available to support customers in the way that best meets their needs, which may be via a digital channel but could also be face to face, through our Customer Hub or our visible and accessible frontline teams.
As part of our all-colleague conference that marked the official launch of new and improved organisation, we asked some of our colleagues from across the organisation what being One Business means to them. The benefits are wide ranging, as demonstrated in this short video.
