Homes for Haringey has bought a new housing management system from Northgate Public Services to help it revamp its housing services and reduce costs by £1 million over the next seven years.
Pete Davey, head of IT, Homes for Haringey, said, “Northgate Housing will increase our efficiency so we can spend more time with tenants – you can’t overestimate the positive impact and the increased trust you gain when customers can see staff dealing with their issues in real time.”
The new system will allow the housing provider to measure staff workloads and prioritise cases that need an urgent response. Homes for Haringey also plans to use the software to measure the social value of what they do by recording whether they have helped a tenant back into education, training or employment or preventing anti-social behaviour by running youth diversion activities.
Davey said, “A key requirement was to find an HMS that wouldn’t need a great deal of time to set up or require lots of training. Many systems come with huge training overheads or massive user manuals that staff don’t have time to read. Northgate’s system is intuitive and doesn’t need lots of training, making it a huge plus for us.”
Roger Birkinshaw, housing director, Northgate Public Services, said, “Housing management goes beyond bricks and mortar; it’s about forming a complete picture of individuals and having a system which allows housing staff to spend more time helping their tenants. The only way to do this is to release people from their daily routine tasks and give them the time to offer premium support to their communities.”
