I want to thank you and your team for the excellent work undertaken over the past year on Housing Management market testing. This has been a complex and challenging project, at the boundaries of innovative approaches to modern housing management, and I am immensely grateful to you all for the successful result now being obtained from ODPM in time for the contracts to go live on the due date, 1 April.

“Thank you for the work done recently by Derek Young. Derek is clearly very well versed in Local Authority and ALMO finances and his easy and approachable manner meant that all involved were able to share their issues or concerns in a positive way.”

“Sue Harvey’s presentation on stress testing at the NHF Risk Conference was worth the price of admission alone.”

CT have assisted the Group with a series of assignments relating to rents, including advising on affordable rents policy, and preparing a rent control manual for our staff. Their team were knowledgeable, worked quickly and professionally, and engaged effectively with all parts of the Group. Their outputs were of consistent high quality.

I gave a brief presentation the other day on how successful the [quality assurance reviews] program had been so far and how it was a possible alternative option to using lean reviews. I have to say it is startling how much progress has been made given its a relatively straight forward and business friendly approach. Our year end rent arrears figures were down to 1.54% which is the lowest they’ve ever been.
I think the key thing for us has been the partnership approach which has seen managers really embrace the reviews as a business tool rather than an outside ‘audit’. Looking forward to planning the next 12 months!

We needed to have independently sourced data on our back office costs and knew that this was a very challenging piece of work. CT responded positively to our brief, developed the approach and secured the co-operation of others in producing a very useful report which we could not have achieved alone. The commission was handled professionally to agreed timescales. We are very pleased with the information and thank CT in particular and all those organisations who participated.

We asked Campbell Tickell to consider the various options open to Thames Reach Bondway through which we could increase our financial strength and independence. The resulting report comprehensively and thoughtfully considered the range of options and included clear and challenging recommendations. As part of the work Campbell Tickell contacted a number of Thames Reach Bondway’s key stakeholders and their diplomatic and astute questioning provided some rich information to back the research and its conclusions. Greg Campbell then presented the findings from the research at a full Thames Reach Bondway Board meeting which led to an excellent, productive debate.