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Forming the partnership
Following successful tendering over a 12-year period, Shropshire
Gas has formed a partnership venture with Severnside Housing
to deliver domestic heating maintenance and solid fuel services
to the Housing Association’s stock of over 5,500 properties.
Together we focused on improving the delivery of services.
For example, communication between our customers and our call centre – 24 hours a day, 365 days per
year – to handle all calls to manage our reactive repair
service, annual appliance servicing and minor works.
Severnside, as the registered social landlord (RSL), has a number
of responsibilities relating to gas as set out in The Gas
Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998. In short,
this legislation makes it the duty of the landlord to ensure
that all gas appliances provided within accommodation and
all installation pipe work within the premises are maintained
in a safe condition to prevent risk of injury to any person.
Landlords have a duty imposed upon them by this legislation
to have all gas appliance installations and pipe work inspected
and checked for safety at least every 12 months by a CORGI
approved engineer. Records detailing these inspections must
be made available at all times to the tenants for examination.
Countrywide this is a large obligation for social housing
landlords. There are around 25.6 million homes in the UK with
more than 5 million described as social housing – of
these just fewer than 3.5 million were owned by local authorities
and a further 1.7 million owned by registered social landlords.
Recruiting the people
Shropshire Gas has engaged in a strategy of removing sub-contracted
labour through direct external recruitment and participation
in Government led training programmes. Shropshire Gas remains
focused on developing the workforce and operates both traditional
apprenticeship programmes and actively participates in Government
initiatives such as New Deal and Training for Work. This strategy
ensures that Shropshire Gas has a directly controlled stable
workforce that supports all areas of service delivery. Workforce
resources have risen by nearly 40 percent due to our successful
recruitment and training programme.
Growing the business
Since the inception of the partnership Shropshire Gas has
achieved significant additional contract success with various
clients from the public and private sectors. This commercial
growth has resulted in strengthening financial performance
with turnover set to double. An example of this growth is
demonstrated by Shropshire Gas’ determination to capitalise
on its ability to provide specialist call handling services
focussed on the gas market. It has extended these services
to encompass private landlords who can now enjoy an out of
hours call handling service on a regional basis.
In addition to bringing costs savings to the partnership,
the horizontal diversification into other market sectors,
including electrical services, has complemented the original
gas service offerings. Responding to the geographic growth,
Shropshire Gas is developing relationships with new potential
RSL clients.
Improving performance
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are fundamental in all of
Shropshire Gas contracts and a culture of analysing performance
has been adopted to ensure that targets and objectives are
met or exceeded. This approach has been especially successful
in managing void house turnaround timescales, which have been
reduced on a consistent basis for RSL clients.
Shropshire Gas’ approach to improving performance across
all its contracts is achieved through encouraging client participation
at all levels. This is viewed as a major asset in delivering
consistent services to all stakeholders and ensures high quality
combined with sustained value. Click here to find out more about performance management.
To find out more about the services we offer to social housing providers contact us on 01630 656161 or email service@shropshiregas.com
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