Your feedback helps create a new Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) Policy

Thank you to the 250 customers who completed our survey.  

What we did 
To help us get the most useful feedback, we intentionally sent a survey to customers who had previously told us they were not satisfied with the way we’d managed a recent report or complaint about ASB, or who generally felt we don’t manage ASB as well as we could. We then spoke to a number of customers who were happy to be contacted to help us interpret the results, going into more detail to understand people’s individual experiences. 

What you told us 
47% of respondents who had reported ASB said they found it difficult to make the report. When we gave the ways available to report ASB, 83% of respondents said it would be easy for them to report ASB to us. 80% of customers said it would be easy to tell us about a Hate Crime of Hate incident. When we spoke with individuals, we received feedback that it was fairly easy to make an initial report but not to maintain contact with the person dealing with an ongoing ASB case. 

What we’ve done 
We’ve updated our procedures, so when an ASB case is opened the officer dealing with the case needs to introduce themselves, give the customer their name and a direct phone number to their office.  This is so we can always answer and respond to the contact by the officer dealing with the case, or by someone else if they are unavailable. We will take opportunities, such as the regular tenants email to re-publicise the ways in which customers can report ASB to us. 

You also told us 
The types of ASB that concern you most are drug use and drug dealing, noise and nuisance bikes and other vehicles.  You also agreed with us prioritising the most serious types of ASB. 

What we’ve done  
Drug use and nuisance bikes, are types of ASB where we’re not generally able to identify the perpetrator. Our previous policy and procedure was focussed on cases where we have an alleged perpetrator and can investigate a ‘case’. 

We now record the work we can undertake to prevent and detect this type of ASB which we carry out with the help of others such as the Police.  We will then update customers (where possible) by publicising the work we’ve done to help tackle the problem. We hope this will build confidence in our service and encourage more reporting. 

In relation to noise, the advice from the Housing Ombudsman is that ASB ‘household noise’ should not be classed as ASB unless there are other aggravating factors.  We have amended our policy to reflect this advice. This will give Housing Officers more guidance on ways we can work with residents to help manage noise when dealing with it as ASB is not appropriate.

In the coming week's we'll also be sharing our updated ASB policy on our website and will promote this when published. 

More information about ASB, advice, ways to report and our responsibilities is available on our website.