Audit Commission report on Homes for Islington

London Borough of Islington - Homes for Islington (ALMO) p 17
63 There are high levels of satisfaction with the way racial harassment is dealt with
and outcomes are tracked for racial harassment and domestic violence cases to
ensure cases are properly resolved.
64 The gap between satisfaction levels of white and BME residents have closed and
they are now closely aligned at 54 per cent and 51 per cent respectively from
46 and 53 per cent in 2002/03. This indicates that there is now a lower level of
satisfaction among BME residents, although BME leaseholders in the 2004
leasehold satisfaction survey expressed a more positive view than their non-BME
counterparts about the services they received from HFI.
65 A project to improve contact with harder to reach groups by Caxton, the repair
contractor, has ended but proved useful in identifying and contacting harder to
reach residents such as the youths involved in training projects run by Caxton.
However, similar outreach work is now done by the performance and
participation officers (PPOs) in HFI’s area offices. They are successfully involving
youth for example, a young person is now chairing a community centre board
and there are open days at Holland Walk and diversionary schemes that are
helping to reduce crime and anti-social behaviour among youths. There are
strong links with local community groups and HFI regularly consult them and get
their feedback to deliver the council’s wider objectives. HFI is organising a
conference of these groups early in 2005 to build closer links and shape services
around feedback received.
66 Impact assessments have been carried out to understand how services impact
differently on residents in terms of race, gender, sexuality, religion and belief and
age. The assessments are being used as part of the planned service and policy
review process.
67 There is a training plan that is now being rolled out and includes diversity training
for staff, partners and the board and has raised awareness of diversity issues
and led to a joint approach to diversity issues and greater consistency.
68 There are diversity monitoring arrangements in place and performance is
<strong>report</strong>ed to the board and sub-boards and HFI complies with the CRE code of
practice in rented housing.
69 Some resources have been secured from the council to ensure public access
points comply with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), but the target of
1 October 2004 was not met. All the area offices now meet the DDA standard
and work is ongoing in the four TMO offices that did not meet the standard.
However, inadequate resources were secured from the council to ensure that
community centres are DDA compliant and HFI were not provided with delegated
budgets to resource this themselves. There is a target date for this work to be
done by the end of 2006/07.
70 Progress to develop the ALMO’s own equality strategy and to reach level 2 of the
Government’s equality standard has been slow, HFI have been unable to recruit
a manager to drive this although a temporary equalities manager has now been
appointed to co-ordinate and map current activity and to gather information to
inform the strategy.
71 The information collected from tenants on diversity and vulnerability is not
consistently flagged on the IT systems although there are clear plans to address
this, but we found an example of a vulnerable tenant who was not getting the
assistance required because there was no indication on the IT system of their
vulnerability.