As part of our ongoing work in Somerton, we’ll be sharing a monthly update on our activity for the community.
We were really pleased to hold our first resident steering group meeting earlier this month. We had a great turn out, with 14 Somerton residents attending, alongside local Councillor Debbie Harvey.
Every month, we’ll take minutes of the meeting and share them as part of our blog. You can see the November minutes here. There may be a short time between the meeting taking place and publishing the minutes – this is because we share the draft minutes with everyone who attended, to make sure we have accurately captured what was talked about and gather any feedback.
Getting started – the first steering group (SG for short!)
In our first meeting, we set out what we hope to achieve as a steering group (please can we always be called this). At the meeting, we talked through and handed out a draft Terms of Reference and Code of Conduct which sets out the purpose of the group, the types of topics we’ll cover and how we will work together. Those who attended the first meeting gave us feedback on these, and you can see the Terms of Reference here.
We’d be really interested to hear from any further residents in Somerton who would like to be part of the group. Our contact details are below, so please get in touch if you’d like to be involved.
When is this work going to happen?
We then talked about some ideas for the next meeting
The SG told us that they would like to focus on the timescales for any work in Somerton. We know that this is something the community understandably wants to know, so we’re going to bring a high-level project plan that sets out key tasks and expected timescales to the next meeting. Our team also explained that these may change – sometimes we have to make decisions based on new information, or projects can be delayed, but we’ll share all of this information with the SG and the community.
Surveys in Somerton
Michael Dyson, our contractor, have been carrying out survey work in the community over the last few weeks. There was some confusion over their latest visit, to carry out measured surveys because residents didn’t know this was going to happen – we’re really sorry about this, and we’re working with Michael Dyson to make sure we learn and improve how we do this in future. To help us with this information, we may still ask specific residents if we can carry out this survey in your home.
We carried out a survey to look at the condition of homes, particularly damp, and we managed to carry this out on around 60% of homes in Somerton and we’re expecting to update the group at the next meeting. We’ll also share information with the community when the survey information has been finalised, and we’re thinking about the best way to do this. We can’t share any information that identifies individual homes, so we can’t share the full report with everybody. However, we want to share as much as we can, which will include talking to individual homes about their results and sharing general information on our findings with the community.
The boundary line – what work will happen where?
We’re getting a lot of questions about what work we’ll be doing on which homes. We’re focusing on regeneration as our main option, but we know that there may be instances where this might not be possible. The detailed work that we carry out is going to be informed by our work with the community, including homeowners, and the survey results as well as other things we need to consider. We expect to know more on this in the coming months.
We’re also in the process of selecting a financial advisor who will advise us and homeowners throughout our work and help us develop affordable options for any homeowners that would like to be involved in our work. Once this financial advisor is in place and our homeowners have had the opportunity to consider all options and let us know what they want to do, we’ll be able to plan this in more detail.
We hope that this blog has been useful – if you have any questions, or if there’s anything you’d like us to cover in future blogs, get in touch with us at community@newportcityhomes.com.
Thanks,
The Somerton team
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Your questions from this month
Do you know what’s going to happen and when?
No – we really, really don’t. There’s a lot of information that we need before we can plan out this work properly, and the survey information will help us with this. The most important thing for our team is hearing from the community, understanding everyone’s concerns, and what people’s preferences are. We’ll be looking at our timescales and the process we will be going through to consider our plans with the steering group over the coming months.
Are you knocking homes down or not? I’m confused!
There’s no easy answer to this. Our focus is on regeneration – that is, demolishing existing homes and building new ones. However, it’s not as simple as that. There are many factors that influence what work we can carry out such as the condition of our current homes, the needs of our NCH tenants, and the preferences of homeowners on the estate. Where we can’t do regeneration work, for whatever reason, we’ll look at refurbishment instead.
Why do you need to measure all homes when the layouts are similar?
When we build new homes in any area, we have to meet Welsh Government standards on the size. This is called the ‘Beautiful Homes and Spaces’ standard, and you can read more about it here.
We know from our existing homes that some of them are actually smaller than that standard and some may be larger. We want to gather more information on this, so we know what size homes are. We have also had a lot of comments that other residents, especially homeowners are really happy with the size of their home, so by getting as much information as we can, it helps us take all of these views into account when we look at improving the designs we shared previously. We have identified more than 20 types of properties in Somerton – and they’re all a little different, so we’re just trying to gather as much information as possible so we know we’re planning based on accurate information.
I’ve had a letter about damp and mould – why bother if you’re demolishing my home?
There’s a lot of work we need to do before we start any work in Somerton. At the moment, we haven’t finalised any designs or even submitted a planning application, so it’s going to be some time before anything happens. In the meantime, we still have a responsibility to our customers, and we have written to customers who we think may have experienced this in the past with some advice on what to do.
Please report any repairs, leaks or issues to us as soon as possible so we can look into them.
You’ve just done a load of surveys – now I’ve had a letter about asbestos work too!
NCH customers may receive a letter from one of our contractors to arrange an asbestos survey in the next few weeks. This is nothing to be concerned about and is one of many checks we need to carry out as a responsible landlord to make sure your home is in good condition. This work is not part of the Somerton project, and is being carried out by our colleagues in other parts of NCH.