Case Study:

Canning Town PFI

In June 2005, the London Borough of Newham awarded Regenter London City East Partnership a 30-year Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract to provide both the management and refurbishment of around 1,250 homes in Canning Town, East London. The overall objective of the PFI contract was to bring the dwellings up to the decent homes standard.

The consortium is made up of Regenter (a joint venture between Pinnacle Regeneration Group and John Laing Social Infrastructure) who provide the funding and act as the principal liaison with the Authority, Pinnacle Housing who provide the Housing Management and Estate Services and Equipe (A joint venture between Pinnacle and John Laing Social Infrastructure) who provide the refurbishment and on-going repairs and maintenance services.

This contract provides an excellent opportunity to make significant and long lasting improvements to a community in an area close to Canary Wharf, the Olympic site in Stratford and benefiting from good transport links via both the London Underground and the Docklands Light Railway.

We’ve already made enormous progress, with Newham announcing the completion of the decent homes programme for Canning Town three months ahead of schedule due to Equipe delivering this component of the contract well in advance of the target date.

Equipe will now provide responsive repairs and cyclical maintenance whilst Pinnacle will continue to be responsible for the delivery of the housing management function.

Working with the community
Pinnacle places a high value on people. Our customers, residents in the local community and staff are important to us and we always like to hear what they have to say. Such feedback is invaluable in designing an effective, accountable and reactive service.

We involve residents in as many areas and in as many different ways as possible, including working closely with the locally-elected Canning Town and Custom House PFI Residents Panel. The members meet monthly to discuss issues affecting the estate and give us a regular briefing with which we design service improvements. Cleaning schedules, for example, were changed in some parts of the estate after members identified areas where cleaning should be more frequent and other parts where the need was not as great.

A number of the Panel’s members have also received specialist training which enables them to carry out inspections of our work. This is important in engendering trust in what we do, since residents can check we’re delivering what we promised. Their involvement has helped maintain the high standard of cleaning our customers rightly expect of our staff.

In the words of one of the members of the Residents Panel, “The Canning Town staff have made an enormous effort to give us the service we want but they’ve also listened when we told them something wasn’t working. More important, though, is the fact they made the changes. This really makes the whole area feel like our home.”

All residents receive regular updates on our work through two newsletters – a quarterly from Pinnacle and the area-focused E16, to which Pinnacle contributes.
With our community days, work with schools and ad-hoc consultations, there is no shortage of stories to write about.

Making open spaces right for everyone is also important. Through our Pinnacle management challenge programme, we’ve been able to provide sensory and secret gardens for the estate. One of these gardens won the TPAS (Tenant Participation Advisory Services) regional housing excellence awards in the green projects and initiatives in the community category.

In each case, residents were actively involved in the design. We might be providing the gardens, but it’s their community we’re providing them for and they are the ones who will benefit from them.

We do all this with only eight Housing management staff and twelve estate services staff, all of whom are dedicated to delivering unrivalled housing services. Each housing manager works with around 350 households.

Property refurbishment
The Decent Homes Programme is the government target to raise the standard of 95 per cent of all council and registered social landlord housing in England by 2010. It says that a decent home “should be warm, weatherproof and have reasonably modern facilities” (source: Department of Communities and Local Government).
 
One of the council’s priorities for Canning Town was the lifting of all 1,250 homes in the contract area to the decent homes standard. As we’ve seen, we’ve already done more than this. Going above the decent homes standard has thrilled many of our residents, with one saying:

“I was delighted when they said they’d replace my kitchen. But, when they said I could have it designed around my needs, I was over the moon. My old kitchen was just that – old. Cooking and cleaning was even more of a chore when the worktops were uneven. So to have a new one, built to a design of my choosing, is simply wonderful.”

For the remainder of the contract, we are providing property repairs and refurbishment on the estate. As with the decent homes objective, we’ve been achieving all of our targets from the start. Already we are completing all responsive repairs in an average of less than four days and completing repairs at the first time of asking 99.4 per cent of the time. Our surveys show that 100 per cent of tenants are satisfied both by the time it takes to complete repairs and the quality of the work.

These results show that we’re making strident progress on improving the standard of homes. We’re proud of this and hope to get even better at delivering this key aspect as the contract matures.

Success
On such a long contract, you might expect there to be some teething troubles. Each party needs to settle in and learn about the area. Given time, performance should pick up. Not in Canning Town.

Pinnacle has consistently exceeded its targets on this project, delivering high levels of customer satisfaction across the board. We’re happy with this, but we want to maintain it and make improvements to deliver an even better service.

The project gained the Public Private Finance Award for Local Government PFI project of the year in 2007 and our overall customer satisfaction rating in 2007, as surveyed by the LB of Newham, was 79 per cent. This figure in Canning Town is higher than the overall satisfaction level achieved by any of the 32 London Boroughs.

Such a record is due in no small measure to the meticulous design of our works programmes and our experience of delivering similar projects in other areas of the country.

Our biggest challenge is to keep on improving. Bev Varney, Contract Manager at Canning Town, says, “It’s very easy to come in and cut the grass and clean a stairwell. But the key is to meet the new challenges and identify the areas where we’re weakest and try and turn them into strengths while maintaining our excellent start here.”

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