Thirteen Group

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year from everyone at Thirteen! 🎄

We're proud to be partnering with Power Of Women💥 (POW) on delivering its school ambassador programme. This project is important, as our younger generation play a key role in helping us achieve our goals within our community resilience strategy, which aims to create engaged, thriving and empowered places where people want to live. We know by engaging and creating school ambassadors, we will not only create great role models within the school setting, but also in the communities in which we live.  Read more 👇

We're a member of a number of regional housing partnerships, the York and North Yorkshire Housing Partnership being one of them. The partnership has just set out its priorities for tackling the housing crisis. Hear more from chair, Nick Atkin 👇

We’re celebrating another year of being Cyber Essentials Plus certified. To achieve Cyber Essentials Plus, we’ve undergone a thorough external assessment of our protection against cyber threats. This certification demonstrates our commitment to maintaining the highest standards of cyber security and keeping customer and colleague data safe. It also supports us to deliver key contracts, as well as explore business growth opportunities to evolve our services for customers. A huge thank you to our team for their hard work and dedication!

🏆 TRAILBLAZING BOT NETS NATIONAL AWARD! 🏆 We're over the moon to have won a UK Housing Award for our invention of a bot capable of processing Universal Credit changes. We developed the bot in response to a new requirement for landlords to verify all rent increases on the national Universal Credit (UC) Landlord Portal. Here's how the win - in the Innovator of the Year category - came about... THE PROBLEM The switch to verification of all rent increases presented us with a colossal challenge. We had more than 13,000 customers in receipt of UC and just one month in which to process the changes. We worked out that we’d need to divert 48 staff to work on nothing other than this administrative task for a whole month. This would be at the expense of spending time helping our customers, and would also generate an overtime cost of around £70,000. WHAT WE DID We have a ‘Better Together’ culture at Thirteen, so we assembled a project team of talented colleagues from across the business to see if we could find a better way. The solution they came up with was to create a bot capable of processing these changes. After much development and testing, followed by more development and testing, we had it working perfectly. And it was all done in-house. THE RESULTS Success! We accurately reported 100% of rental increases to the DWP. We freed up our staff so they could be there for customers at a time when their rent was increasing. We reduced our costs (we're pretty sure it contributed towards a drop in year-end debt too - down from 3.22% in March 2023 to 2.9% in March 2024). And we even shared our learning with other social landlords to run a pilot - this has led to the Department for Work and Pensions giving official approval to roll out the use of bots in verifying new claims across the sector. Well done to all involved! #UKHA2024 #ukhousing #UKHousingAwards

As a housing association, we exist to provide housing and support services. We’re also here to help our communities to develop and thrive. We’re passionate about collaboration, working with partners to empower those living in our estates and sharing best practice to create sustainable communities in which our customers are proud to live. Over the last couple of months our head of regeneration and communities, Angela Corner, has presented at a range of conferences, panel events and was a guest speaker on the CVFM Live podcast, to further strengthen Thirteen’s commitment towards these goals. Covering topics from authentic customer engagement, enhancing economic and social value in our communities, and collaborative working, Angela has showcased our approach to community resilience and our vision to work with both customers and partners alike to create homes and communities for the future. Most recently, Angela spoke at the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Cleveland ASB Summit as part of #ASBWeek. The week long campaign aims to encourage communities to take a stand against ASB, as well highlighting the actions that can be taken by those experiencing it. If you’d like to know more about Thirteen’s approach, challenges faced and aims for the future, please visit our website. https://lnkd.in/e3Dw3qJk HACT Teesside University CVFM Radio

It was great to meet with the Mayor of the North East, Kim McGuinness, at the North East Housing Partnership board meeting earlier. We have been able to meet her on several occasions over the past 6 months, but it was fantastic to hear more detail about her ambitions for the region and the work she has been doing to change things on a national level to make it easier for us in the region. With greater devolution of funding to come over the next few years, including a single integrated settlement for the North East in 2026/27, it is an important time for the region to get together and prepare for the future, and this morning the board was able to discuss what collaboration we were already doing and potential further opportunities. We are committed to continuing working closely with Kim, The North East Combined Authority and collaborating with other willing partners and with the right support, we can go further and faster. 

📸 "The neighbours are all looking over - they'll think I'm a celebrity or something!" It's fair to say Dougie Leeming quite enjoyed having his photograph taken when we visited. The 83-year-old has just moved into a bungalow on our new Westdale development in Thornaby. And it's also fair to say he's very happy with it! “It’s beautiful,” he said. “I love everything about it. "I’ve lived in Thornaby all my life and I was over the moon when I heard the news I’d got this new bungalow. “My last house was too big but this is perfect for me. I can just walk into the town centre in a few minutes." At Westdale, we've worked with local construction firm T. Manners & Sons Ltd to deliver 37 new two, three and four-bedroom homes for affordable rent on the site of the former Anson House and Hudson House tower blocks. We’d like to thank Homes England and Tees Valley Combined Authority for their funding contributions to the scheme. We’re also grateful for the support we’ve had from Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council and local councillors throughout the redevelopment of the site. We hope Dougie and the rest of Westdale's new residents enjoy life in their new homes.

We had a fantastic day yesterday working with our HENNE partners. Our employability service shared some of the great customer stories from the Tees Valley Move Forward programme.

We're delighted to be delivering these net zero homes with Esh Group. They're packed with all manner of technologies and we're looking forward to seeing how they perform and learning as much as we can along the way.