Katherine was born and raised in Middlesborough. Her roots in social housing and experience across youth and community settings have shaped her focus on customer needs. Katherine's experience as a teacher and a stint in the private sector brings a passion for community building and customer care.
What are some of your key achievements as regional director of the East Coast and Yorkshire region?
Our focus is on being visible in our communities. Sustaining our tenancies and keeping customers safe in their homes. This has allowed us to achieve a lot of brilliant milestones, including:
- Improving our response to anti-social behaviour. We are keeping to the timescales promised to customers
- Sustaining more tenancies and avoiding unnecessary evictions. We have personalised our approach to our income management and rent collection service
- Letting our empty homes quicker. We’ve built a strong partnership between our maintenance teams and contractors
- Reaching 100% compliance against gas and electric checks in our homes.
- Helping the most vulnerable people in our region make rent payments. We have also supported customers to secure future accommodation
How do you engage with customers and communities? How does that influence your priorities?
I meet so many amazing customers in my role. Our goal is to be visible in our communities. I am often on estate walkabouts, community days and service visits. This means I can hear feedback from customers. For example, a need to improve our maintenance services and tackling anti-social behaviour which we have taken on board.
We are lucky to have some really engaged customers who are as passionate as I am about making a difference who I work with at our viewpoint meetings. We know in-person meetings don’t work for everyone, or are at times customers can’t attend. We are looking at different ways to gain feedback and listen to all customers.
What are the main things customers in your region should know?
We are planning to roll out Home Group’s digital allocations and lettings platform. This means potential customers can apply directly for a home with us.
For customers who receive support from us, we are developing our support planning tools. This includes how colleagues work alongside customers in that journey.
We are always aiming to be more visible and accessible face-to-face around the region.