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“Old land of the mountains, paradise of the poets, every valley, every cliff a beauty guards.” Extract from “Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau” the national anthem of Wales.

Introduction

We are excited to introduce our Corporate Plan 2025.

With just over 10 years since Tai Calon was formed, it seemed like a great time to review where we want to go. In doing so, we know that there are some significant challenges that we must face. Those are the challenges are the ever-increasing expectations of our customers, the need for more affordable homes in Blaenau Gwent, the affordability of our customers’ homes, and the urgent threat of climate change.

We must face all those challenges, but the one challenge that sits above all others, is to increase customer satisfaction with the services that we provide. Therefore, our 2025 mission sets the goal that over 90% of our customers are satisfied, or very satisfied, with Tai Calon. Why?

We were established to serve the needs of our customers, and we only continue because the rent we collect. Consequently, our customers deserve a high-quality landlord service;

High satisfaction will in turn create trust between Tai Calon and our customers. Trust will be essential to ensure the customer support for the other areas where we seek to work.

The mission sets targets for those other areas, such as improving the energy efficiency of our customer’s homes, and developing new properties within the communities of Blaenau Gwent.

With energy efficiency the goal is 85 (as measured by the Standard Assessment Procedure, the method for calculating energy efficiency of dwellings). There are two reasons for this goal:

To save customers money on the energy cost of their homes and

Tai Calon’s role in addressing climate change, given that dwellings across the UK contribute 25% of the total greenhouse gas emissions.

The energy efficiency goal will be a stretch to achieve because like all housing associations in Wales, our current business plan can only fund part of these improvements. Consequently, Tai Calon will be seeking to innovate, with others, to find ways to meet this target.

The final area of the mission is to develop 200 new affordable homes by 2025.

The mission can only be achieved by having the right culture. Therefore, over the next few years, we will nurture a culture that we feel will best enable us to deliver that mission. This culture is summarised by the following CALON values.

  • We will encourage Creativity, so we can think differently, and this helps us to make improvements and take appropriate risks.
  • We will enable collaboration, teamwork, and consideration through Authenticity
  • We will try new things, update our skills, growing professionally and personally through Learning
  • We take Ownership and accountability for our actions and how we work together
  • And we can count on each other through challenging times because we are Not on our own

Together the mission and values explain what our aspirations are through to 2025, and how we intend to deliver them. And both the mission and the values underpin the reason why we exist, our vision. That vision is true today as it will be in the future, that Tai Calon exists to inspire its people so that they go beyond affordable housing and are driven to create vibrant communities across Blaenau Gwent.

Best Regards,

About The Organisation

Tai Calon was established on 26th July 2010. We are a not-for-profit, community mutual organisation and Blaenau Gwent’s largest social housing provider, with nearly 6,000 homes.

We are a major employer in the local area, with over 260 well trained and committed staff who all contribute to our annual turnover of over £25 million.

To date we have invested over £120 million in our homes to ensure they reached and are maintained to the Welsh Housing Quality Standard.

In 2020 Tai Calon was named one of the Sunday Times Top 100 Not For Profit Companies to work for.

We were also proud to be awarded a coveted Customer Service Excellence Award – recognising our commitment to the highest standards of service for our community. In addition, the company secured Disability Confident status, recognising our efforts to ensure a safe, supportive and inclusive environment for disabled colleagues.

About Blaenau Gwent

Blaenau Gwent offers some of the most affordable homes in Britain.

We’re very proud of the strong sense of community across our three valleys and the rich social history of the area, for example the inspiration and birthplace of the National Health Service in Tredegar.

Key Information…

  • Situated in South East Wales, approximately 30 miles from Cardiff and 20 miles to Newport. Bristol is 56 miles away and it is 95 miles to Birmingham
  • 15 miles long from north to south; 8 miles wide from east to west
  • Made up of three valleys with transport links mainly running up and down the valleys
  • An ageing population of around 70,000 living in 32,000 households.
  • Key settlements are Ebbw Vale, Abertillery, Tredegar and Brynmawr
  • A changing economic focus towards manufacturing and service sectors
  • The highest rate of unemployment and lowest economic activity in Wales
  • Lowest life expectancy in Wales for both men and women

Our Vision

Tai Calon exists to inspire its people so that they go beyond affordable housing and are driven to create vibrant communities across Blaenau Gwent.

In 2020, the Board approved four high-level themes for Tai Calon for the five years to 2025.

The four themes were:

  • Work close with our customers
  • Deliver high quality, affordable homes
  • Empower our staff
  • Be a trusted partner, rooted in our communities

Our Corporate Plan takes those themes and makes them into a motivational vision and compelling mission, with measurable objectives.

Our Mission

By 2025, over 90% of our customers will be satisfied, or very satisfied, with the overall service that they receive. Overall satisfaction in 2025 will also reflect customers opinion on: A. The quality of their home; the improvement in its environmental efficiency (subject to funding to achieve a SAP* rating of 85) B. The perception of their neighbourhood, which is informed by some of the 200 new homes to be developed across the county.”

We believe that achieving a high level of customer satisfaction can only be done by a focus on shaping and improving services, based on what our customers tell us.

Further, the best way for us to measure how well we are improving is to ask how satisfied our customers are.

By achieving our mission of improving customer satisfaction, we will know that we have:

  • Listened to our customers and acted on what they told us
  • Dealt with customers’ queries promptly and in a supportive way
  • Provided a repair service that meets our customers’ expectations around speed, quality, and timeliness
  • Ensured the quality of our homes meets expectations, and rent you pay is seen as value for money
  • Made homes warmer and cheaper to heat, minimising the environmental impact
  • Fully consulted in all that we do to improve local communities, and our customers are happy with what we have achieved.

Our Culture

Over the next five years, we will create the right environment to help nurture a culture that is demonstrated by our values.

Led by the experience and insight of customers, we will be delivering our Mission by supporting a single team culture.

Everyone will have the space to create new ideas, and the time to focus on the needs of the customers and their community.

When we encourage Creativity, we can think differently, and this helps us to make improvements and take risks. We enable collaboration, teamwork, and consideration through Authenticity. By trying new ideas, updating our skills, helping us to grow professionally and personally through Learning. We take Ownership and accountability for our actions and how we work together, and we can count on each other through challenging times, because we are Not on our own. These values help create the culture where Tai Calon can flourish and evolve as a caring and people-focused force within our community.

We want to create a culture of trust, from which flows engagement and openness.

We want creativity that drives solutions to problems, where mistakes are key to our learning, and an agility in risk taking that reflects a changing workplace in the 21st century. This means that we will be working together to transform the things we do, and how we do them.

The way we work will demonstrate that our culture is central to our colleague engagement and wellbeing.

We will place culture as a primary consideration across all areas and empower it through the delivery of our objectives and key results by aligning our work ethic and behaviour to our values.

Our Values

Our values are shared across Tai Calon. Having clear values helps us to ensure that we are all working towards the same goals and that we know what is expected of us.

Values help all at Tai Calon to understand how we want to do things; they support our vision, our mission and help shape our culture.

That is why every single business outcome, action and decision should be aligned with these values.

Our Values
“Community is not an important thing, it’s everything.”

Click below to download a copy of our corporate plan 2020 to 2025