Hello and welcome to your latest Thrive news roundup

Thrive, like many other organisations, continues to feel the impacts of COVID – costs and availability of labour is challenging, and this is impacting the contractors and suppliers that provide our services too. I want to reassure you that we are doing everything possible to get these contracts back on track including making sure that they are not paid for work that hasn’t been done – you will see this reflected in year- end service charge statements.  We really appreciate your patience as we work to resolve these issues, and there’s more on the steps we are taking in our latest newsletter which can be found via the links at the bottom of this page.

We are saying goodbye to Andy Sage who has chaired the Customer Experience Panel for many years and I want to record my thanks for the invaluable work that he and the panel have done in bringing customer’s views into Thrive. We want to build on this, so we are reviewing the way that we will continue to gather feedback and involve customers. We know that many of you prefer digital contact and we want to engage the views of a wider range of customers going forward, so look out for updates and opportunities to be a part of this.

Thrive continues to invest in its homes and is aware that many older properties are not as thermally efficient as newly built properties so we are looking closely at what we can do to improve this. It takes a bit of time to work out what the best solutions for each home are, but programmes are being developed to make homes easier to heat.  In the meantime, we are continuing to invest in modern double glazing and replacing older boilers – as every little helps.

We also want to ensure that where homes need to be replaced we make good use of the land – providing more homes on the same plot helps to preserve green spaces and we aim to do this without compromising on the quality of the homes. Its been really exciting to welcome new customers to one of these replacement developments in Abbots Langley and to have customer’s feedback on the properties. This helps us understand what’s important to customers so that we can incorporate this into new designs and refurbishment programmes. We know how important having a home, whether it’s brand new or part of an established community where you’ve lived for years, is and that’s what inspires everything that we do at Thrive.

I hope you find this update useful, and on behalf of Thrive, I wish you well as we head into the winter months.

Elspeth Mackenzie
Chief Executive