Housing Associations
Our team has been working with housing associations in different capacities for over 20 years. We work with housing associations ranging from 12 housing units, up to over 6,000 housing units.
Why work with us?
Scotland has a changing housing landscape with diverse housing needs. With major changes in their social, economic and regulatory environments, housing associations require robust assurance and advice to support them with the opportunities and threats that these changes present. In addition, funding challenges and the demands of housing quality and energy efficiency standards have required housing associations to consider alternative models of funding for development.
We provide our clients with assurance that their control environments are sound or help them to improve their control arrangements. Our advice covers all activities and considers financial and non-financial systems, which is particularly important during a period of significant change. Self-assessment is also becoming more prevalent and we can help with developing this or check this is robust and can be relied upon. In addition, as funding remains a challenge, we support our clients as they look to reorganise, set up joint working arrangements with other associations, charity and support organisations, or merge.
Our work in this sector
Working closely with our client, during the internal audit planning process, we proposed that a business process review of reactive repairs be carried out with a view to identifying procedural improvements and removing waste from the process. We led a facilitated one-day session with key staff to map the current process, identifying opportunities and threats using business improvement tools, recording the changes that were required to the existing process.
Following the session, our client made changes to improve efficiency and decrease the risk of reduced service delivery to tenants.
We conducted an asbestos management review for a client, providing assurance about arrangements to ensure compliance with regulation covering policy, risk assessment, maintenance of the asbestos register, training, and use of licenced contractors for asbestos work.
To coincide with a move to new housing software we facilitated a review of arrears collection activities for a client. The outcome was positive, confirming the validity of a number of current activities, whilst identifying changes to team structures and working between departments to improve efficiency and effectiveness.