Neighbourhood Plans
One of the aims of LMH is to create well-established and sustainable neighbourhoods with robust demand for LMH properties and neighbourhoods. The physical improvement to customers' homes alone will not guarantee the improvements in life quality that LMH wishes to drive forward in its neighbourhoods. Liverpool contains some of the most deprived areas in the country; problems beyond the maintenance of the housing stock need to be addressed if the well being of tenants and residents is to be improved in a sustainable way. Success with this agenda is dependent upon meeting housing need, but is also reliant upon other factors; for example, working with partners to improve local environments, supporting social and economic growth and dealing with crime. These factors, together with high quality housing and services contribute to the success and long-term sustainability of communities.
What are the Neighbourhood Plans?
Following on from the establishment of the LMH neighbourhood boundaries which have been on the website for some time, we have now created 29 Neighbourhood Plans which will help us to achieve our aim. They are designed to improve the sustainability of individual neighbourhoods by maximising the level of internal and external resources and services available in those neighbourhoods. Their aim is to allow the organisation to prioritise neighbourhood need, identify individual neighbourhood issues and the actions necessary to improve neighbourhood sustainability. The plan is to instigate positive impacts on all neighbourhoods and to narrow the gap between the best and underperforming neighbourhoods. Using something called a Sustainability Index (which collates data such as unemployment, crime levels, numbers of benefit claimants and worklessness, educational attainment, household income, demand for property, how many empty properties there are, what the turnover levels are and so on), neighbourhoods have been classified as either bronze (potential), silver (aspiring) or gold (performing). The bronze neighbourhoods will require more immediate and more intensive interventions than silver and gold neighbourhoods.
How do LMH know what the issues are?
When compiling the Neighbourhood Plans, LMH surveyed a number of customers in all neighbourhoods using an audit questionnaire on the issues that were a priority to you and what your views/opinions/concerns were about the neighbourhood where you live – this was carried out at various open days, by post, via tenant board members and it was also advertised on the website so we hope you had an opportunity to tell us what you thought. In addition we used information provided to us from the STATUS survey we had carried out last year which also gave us invaluable information about how satisfied (or not) you were with particular services and where you live.
LMH also interviewed managers and staff that spend time in the neighbourhoods on a daily basis to record the issues they regularly face.
LMH met with various representatives from Liverpool City Council from all of the neighbourhood areas, Housing Market Renewal, Housing Strategy and Liverpool First to ensure that the plans were aligned accordingly with the regeneration of Liverpool as a whole.
LMH met with various other stakeholders such as social enterprises, framework contractors, other Registered Social Landlords, neighbourhood supporting agencies and the Primary Care Trust.
LMH also invited tenants, staff and housing management contractors on a tour of the neighbourhoods. Their role was to identify any visual priorities or issues that may be apparent in each of the 29 neighbourhoods.
What will LMH do with this information?
The neighbourhood plans have been launched at our Annual Tenants Conference on Friday 26th March 2010 at St George's Hall.
They refer to LMH working with key strategic partners and stakeholders in the statutory and voluntary sectors who possess the skills, resources and capacity to work with us to deliver our plans and specifically mention signposting, aligning LMH approach to the strategic aims of it's partners including the City Council and Liverpool First, joined up partnership working with other social landlords and agencies and using the procurement of our investment works to bring added value to the neighbourhoods.
In order to move forward and begin to deliver the interventions within the plans and start to make significant impacts within LMH neighbourhoods, it is crucial for all LMH tenants to be aware not only of which LMH neighbourhood they live in but what the plans are for it and how they can be involved and contribute to making their neighbourhood a nicer place to live.
We hope that the information contained within the Neighbourhood Plans will be valuable to you as you will be able to see what specific challenges we are going to be tackling over the next three years in the neighbourhood where you live and together we can make a difference!
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