About our Big Plan
Our purpose: Homes we are proud of
Delivering homes we are proud of sits at the heart of everything we do and want to be. It drives our decisions and our actions.
In delivering our landlord services, we want to be proud of every home we manage and develop.
To help us achieve this ambition, we need to ensure that we are proud of every call we take, every repair we carry out, every investment we make and every transaction or process we implement. Every person working within our organisation is charged with finding ways to take pride in the work they do, so that collectively we can reach our goals.
We have devised this three-year plan to connect all parts of our business, so that every action we take will help us achieve our purpose.
As a housing association with charitable aims, everything we do goes into improving the communities in which we work. Whether that be through building new properties; helping customers to get the best service or support that they need; investing in our current housing stock; or finding ways to make neighbourhoods attractive places to live.
Our vision: Improving lives
Our commitment to improving lives is what makes us more than just a landlord.
We see ourselves as an “anchor” organisation in Oldham. Around 10% of the population in Oldham lives in an FCHO home and we make a significant contribution as a local business and a local employer. As such we have a significant stake in the local area and want to play our role in building strength and resilience in our communities.
We provide crucial services to support our customers in a variety of ways, including finding routes in to work or training; assisting with ways to cope with the increasing demands on their finances; and overall, supporting them to remain happy and independent at home.
Our aspiration and vision of improving lives is all about working with our customers to support them to get the most out of their lives, underpinned by living in a safe and comfortable home, in a neighbourhood that provides what they want from their local environment.
Our roadmap to delivering our Big Plan
Over the next three years we are going on a journey to help us deliver our strategic priorities…
This will help us make sure we are focusing on the right things i.e., the things that matter to our customers, and that our targets, resources and projects achieve the required impact.
During this first year of our Big Plan, we will review our Target Operating Model and consider how our structures can best work together. We will look at how we create social value as a business and the ways we can work to achieve the best outputs and services.
We work with our partners to tackle the shortage of affordable housing in the North West, and pledge to find ways to help reduce levels of homelessness, and raise the standards of accommodation across all sectors, wherever we have any influence.
In Year Two we will build on the foundations set in Year One and continue to find ways to keep improving what we do and increasing the efficiency of how we do things.
We are continually looking for ways to be more effective; to better connect our systems and reduce waste through more streamlined processes. As our systems become more integrated and seamless, this will enable our colleagues to be more agile and better able to serve our customers more directly.
This is where we challenge ourselves to bring our many projects and initiatives together in such a way as to really lift the whole performance and impact of our organisation, so we can evidence why our customers and colleagues think we are a “great” organisation.
We want to move beyond just being “good” enough, and really push our boundaries for success. As our culture keeps evolving during the life of our Big Plan, we look to keep building our resilience and our ability to adapt and respond positively to our external environment.
Watch our Big Plan come to life!
The drivers behind our Big Plan
Five key drivers are influencing our priorities and direction of travel:
1. Health and Safety
Customer and colleague safety is paramount to us. We will focus key investment streams to continually improve our customers’ homes and make sure we provide high quality, safe places to live. We will actively support the wellbeing of our colleagues and implement safe working practices in every aspect of our business.
2. Equality, diversity and inclusion
We want to create an organisation that understands and values the importance of having a diverse customer base and a correlating workforce. Our vision is for everyone to be able to be their authentic self when dealing with FCHO in any capacity, and for the organisation to proactively tackle areas of inequality or under representation.
3. Sustainability
Reducing our impact on the environment and playing our role in tackling climate change are crucial. We will proactively respond to political net zero targets and deliver coordinated programmes of work across our housing stock and all of our business activities, enabling us to make a positive difference to customers who live in FCHO homes and communities now and in years to come.
4. Value for money / efficiencies
Optimising value for money enables us to plough money into providing high quality homes and services we are proud of. We will make the most of our resources, simplify our approaches and reduce any waste in our processes to achieve this end.
5. Social value
We are an anchor organisation in the Oldham borough and committed to creating as much social value as possible with and for our communities. We will embrace partnership working with other stakeholders to ensure that opportunities to collaborate are optimised for the wider good.
Enablers behind our Big Plan
The key elements needed to achieve our Big Plan:
People
Nothing can happen without having the right people in place and on board with what we want to achieve as an organisation. That’s why we will look to recruit and retain colleagues who share our values and aspirations. We will support, nurture and develop those colleagues to provide an inclusive and dynamic company, where people want to work.
IT and Systems
We will find ways to improve how we collate, store and use data to equip us with the information and insight to better provide our services. We will ensure that customers and colleagues can connect and engage with our business more easily.
Projects
Our programme of projects will form the backbone of our change and transformation work. It will connect all of our efforts to delivering our Big Plan goals.
Finances
We will ensure that the organisation is financially secure and well-managed, so that we can achieve our ambitions in a sustainable way that adds value for current and future customers.
Partners
Working with a range of partners enables us to extend our reach and impact in how we can support and assist our customers and communities. This will enable us to realise our wider ambitions as a developer and an anchor organisation, that shapes and influences place-making activities.
Our strategic priorities
We are focusing on four priority areas to deliver our Big Plan 2022-2025:
Our Big Ambitions
We have ambitious plans for 2022-2025 and we have set ourselves Our Big Ambitions – to help us achieve these.
Our Big Ambitions are intended to push us to reach new levels of service delivery, which focus on our customers' needs and delivering homes and neighbourhoods we are all truly proud of.
We have firm foundations of investment and service delivery to build on, but we want to push ourselves to be more than just a landlord.
Our Big Ambitions will help us to maximise the potential of our activities as an anchor organisation, contributing to the future economic growth and prosperity of our local region.
Our Big Ambitions will be measured at the end of March 2025 to evidence our progress.
All of our team and individual targets over the next three years will be aligned to our big ambitions and will be measured through our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), our Operational Performance Indicators (OPIs).
Our Strategic Risk Register and our Project Plans will also provide the relevant frameworks to support our endeavours and ensure that we meet our obligations and ambitions in ways that are safe, sustainable and create a lasting and positive legacy.