Report shows strong year for developing new homes

Highlights include customer satisfaction has remained above 90% with 92.7% customers being satisfied with the overall service offered by Ongo, with 93.3% of customers being satisfied that they were kept informed.

Andy Orrey, Chief Executive, said: “This year marks our 10th anniversary, and in that short time we’ve achieved a lot and grown into a group of commercial and community-focused businesses with two aims, to generate revenue to build much needed affordable homes and increase the support available for people to improve their opportunities.

“Financially we’ve had another strong year, with a profit of £11.5million with £13.7million invested in developing new homes. We secured funding of £7.75million from the Homes and Communities Agency to build 257 new homes. We also saw our first shared ownership homes go on the market which is an exciting step for us; being able to offer another type of affordable home to people and help them get on the property ladder.”

Customers were also given new methods to get in touch with Ongo, with the online ‘live chat’ feature launching in 2016/17. 613 conversations were held within the first 12 months of this new service going live. Online enquiries also increased from 1,200 in 2015/16 to 2,657 in 2016/17. The number of social media enquiries also increased from 291 in 2015/16 to 642 in 2016/17.

Supporting local people into employment was an area that Ongo exceeded targets in 2016/17. 742 accessed some kind of employment support over the last 12 months, whether this was attending the weekly job club, life coaching or mentoring, which beat their target of 500 people to support. They also supported 250 people into employment, meaning the Employment Support Team supported 100 more people than the target of 150.