Remembering Sheila Seleoane

We’re so sorry for what happened and our thoughts are with Sheila’s family and her neighbours this week.  We know that Sheila was isolated and that we missed opportunities to find her earlier. 

We’ll always remember Sheila and since that day, we have been improving the way we work. We remain committed to learning from what happened, so we make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

In February 2022 we commissioned Altair, an independent research consultancy, to investigate why we took so long to discover that Sheila had died and identify the opportunities we had missed. The report contained 37 recommendations and, following the coroner’s report in the summer, we created a customer wellbeing action plan to track progress against these.  

Listening to residents and colleagues 
When we were developing our action plan it was important to get the views of our residents and teams. We held workshops with residents and colleagues from across the organisation to really understand from them what we needed to change. The emerging themes gave us a really strong steer of areas to focus on.  

What we have done 
Over the past year we have made changes to our policies and procedures to reduce silo working and better join the dots when something isn’t right. From the way we do estate inspections or gas servicing, to following up arrears we’re putting in new ways of working to ensure the wellbeing of our residents is at the front and centre.  

At the heart of this is putting a new local model in place which is currently underway. This will reduce the size of our neighbourhood patches. We’re also cutting out bureaucracy, so colleagues are empowered to spend more time with residents in our communities and make decisions to do the right thing.  

Checking in 
By September 2022, we had contacted over 400 residents we hadn’t heard from to check on their wellbeing. If a resident hasn’t been in touch for some time or if someone is concerned about their welfare, we continue to alert our neighbourhood team to check everything is OK. For example our neighbourhood teams will contact residents who have not paid their rent, before we take action or apply directly for Universal Credit. Likewise, gas contractors allow more time between a final gas service appointment date and the expiry date of the current gas safety certificate so our teams can contact and support customers.   

What’s coming up 
In April, we’ll be starting to put in place our new local model. This will enable us to get closer to our customers and build stronger relationships with our partners including the police, community organisations, and local authorities.    

As we bed in our new teams, we’re developing training to support colleagues to join the dots both by using data and their own experience and expertise. This will encourage us all to be more curious and do the right thing for our customers.  

To support our people to join the dots, we’re piloting a new digital tool which gives colleagues a 360 view of every resident and their home. This gives an at a glance look at the information we have on customers and their homes and will help colleagues to quickly identify if there may be an issue. 

Sharing our learnings 
Many of the issues Altair identified affect landlords across the sector, and we wanted to share our learnings to make sure this never happens again. We hosted several roundtable sessions with the National Housing Federation, other landlords and local authorities.  We also took part in a Housing Quality Network Joining the Dots webinar which focused on how we and other landlords can use data and insight to interact with customers and predict when they might need our support. We’ll continue to share these learnings and explore the themes particularly the delicate balance between a right to peaceful enjoyment of your home and checking that a resident is ok.    

And lastly 
We know we need to do better and will continue to focus on improving our ways of working.  

Peabody Chief Executive, Ian McDermott