Transparency

The Transparency, Influence and Accountability (TIA) Standard is a key part of how housing associations are regulated, and it sets out what residents can expect from their landlord. It requires us to:

• Be transparent - by publishing clear, accurate and accessible information about how we are run, how we spend money, and how we make decisions.
• Enable influence - by making sure resident can shape and challenge the services they receive, and have a real say in decisions that affect their homes and communities.
• Be accountable - by showing how we act on feedback, how we measure our performance, and how we take responsibility when things go wrong.

This standard is about ensuring resident have the information they need and opportunities to hold us to account. 

You can find details and profiles of our Executive team and Board members on our How We’re Managed page.

You find out more information about the responsibilities of each of our Executive Directors in their profiles on the Meet the Executive team page.

You can also view this information in the organisational structure chart, which is also accessible from our ‘How We’re Managed’ page.

You can find out about our governance arrangements, including our governance structure, on our How we’re Managed page. 

All of our main policies can be found on our Policies page.

Policies are broken down into four main sections:

• Living in your home
• Your community
• How we’ll support you
• Other policies

You can find lots of information about complaints, including a frequently asked questions and a useful video guide about to what expect when you make a complaint, on our Complaints page. 

On this page you will also find a copy of our full Complaints policy and information about our Complaints process, which fully explains how we prioritise complaints.

We want to ensure our residents are involved in creating change and improving West Kent. Residents can make a genuine difference and there are many ways you can get involved. You can find out more about these opportunities on our Opportunities to Get Involved page.

Our Scrutiny Panel is a small group of residents that look at areas in need of improvement. The panel meets regularly to consider how we can deliver better service to our residents and discuss their findings. Their recommendations are then presented to the Board by members of the panel. You can find out more on our Scrutiny Panel page.

We publish details of resident consultations directly with residents affected.

You can find details of current consultations and share your views through our Current consultations page. 

We also have a Resident Influencers group who review current and proposed new policies, provide feedback and share suggestions on how they could be improved. You can find out more on our Opportunities to get involved page. 

Our Executive Director of Neighbourhoods and Housing, Sasha Harrison, is responsible for compliance with consumer standards.

Our Chair of the Board, Piers White, is the Board Member responsible for complaints.

Our Executive Director of Property and Asset Management, Neil Diddams, leads at board level on health and safety and building safety compliance.

Our operational health and safety lead is Martin Flowers, Head of Facilities.

We publish details about our spending, grants and use of service charge revenue in our financial statements. These can be found in the Reports and Strategies section of the website on the Annual Reports and Financial Statements page. This is updated annually.

We also publish a more accessible and customer-friendly annual report which is available on our Residents' Annual Report page.

We publish details about our income and expenditure in our financial statements. These can be found in the Reports and Strategies section of the website in the Annual Reports and Financial Statements page. This is updated annually.

We also publish a more accessible and customer-friendly annual report which is available on our Residents' Annual Report page. 

Our current Strategic Plan (2025-30) sets out our five-year strategy. You can read more about this on our Strategic Plan page, where you can also download a full copy of the plan.

Simply put, our ambition is that by 2030 our customers: 

• Will have a positive experience regardless of who they are, where they live or how and when they choose to interact with us.
• Will feel we listen and act on their views.
• Will feel proud of the homes they live in.

Objectives of the plan are:

• Excellent services: we want to continue to deliver excellent services in a friendly, solution focused way.
• Successful communities: we want to provide homes and build communities residents are proud to live in, with better support to sustain a successful tenancy and manage life changes.
• Grow and re-shape: we want to increase our homes in management to 10,000 and to re-shape our property portfolio to better meet the current and future local needs across Kent and Medway.
• Best in Kent: we want to be known as one of the best social housing providers in Kent.

We're passionate about the role a housing association can play in society and have been since 1989. We recently celebrated our 35th anniversary with our ’35 years of West Kent’ campaign.  

Key to this campaign are 35 stories for 35 years, each showcasing a different part of our commitment to providing places to live and giving people space to grow. The stories link back to one of our four themes: history and legacy, diversity, achievements, and innovation.

You can read more in the 35 years of West Kent section of our website.

Our Annual Reports can be found in the Reports and Strategies section of the website in the Annual Reports and Financial Statements page.

We also publish a more accessible and customer-friendly annual report which is available on our Residents' Annual Report page. 

We regularly monitor and report on our performance to ensure we deliver on our strategic plan. We measure resident satisfaction and report on targets set by our Board to check how well we're doing as a business.

You can find our most recent performance information on our Quarterly satisfaction and performance scores page.

To read more about what we're doing with your feedback, check out our What we're doing with your feedback page.

Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) are a regulatory requirement that assess how well landlords are doing in providing good quality homes and services.

TSMs consist of 22 measures:

• 10 management information measures based on information we hold on how we deliver services and manage homes.
• 12 tenant perception measures gathered from tenant surveys. 

The TSMs focus on five key themes:

• Keeping properties in good repair
• Maintaining building safety
• Effective complaints handling
• Respectful and helpful tenant engagement
• Responsible neighbourhood management.

You can view our results from 2024/25 on our Tenant Satisfaction Measures results page.

We want to deliver excellent services, and improving the way we handle complaints is part of that. As an organisation, we view complaints as an opportunity to learn and improve services for our residents and customers.

On our Annual service improvement report and self-assessment page you can view information about our complaints performance, including:

• our Annual Complaints and Service Improvement report
• our Housing Ombudsman self-assessment
• our Housing Ombudsman landlord performance report

For information about our complaints policy and process, you can visit our Complaints page.

In our most recent stability check, completed by the Regulator of Social Housing in December 2024, we retained a G1/V2 grading. This grading indicates compliance with the financial viability and governance elements of the Governance and Viability Standard.

The Housing Ombudsman publish decisions on any cases investigated on the Decisions page of their website.

Our Housing Ombudsman landlord performance report and self-assessment can also be found on our Annual service improvement report and self-assessment page.

The Decent Homes Standard provides a definition of what a decent home is and applies to the social rented sector. You can find more information on the government's website, on the ‘A decent home: definition and guidance’ page. 

At the end of the financial year 2023/24, 100% of West Kent’s homes were compliant to the Decent Homes Standard.

All of our latest news stories can be found on our News and Events page.

We also publish our residents’ magazine, Neighbourhood News, three times a year. This is sent to all our homes in April, August and December. You can read the latest edition on our Neighbourhood News page.

As West Kent employs more than 250 people it is required by the government to publish details of its gender pay gap, specifically the difference in average female earnings compared to average male earnings.

You can read our latest report on our Gender Pay Gap statement page.

You can find information about all the core services that West Kent offers across several pages on our site:

• Moving in
• Your new home
• Living in your home
• Looking after your home and garden

There are different types of tenancy agreements, and your rights as a tenant depend on the type of agreement you have.

For information about different tenancies, please visit our Tenancy types page, where you can also find a copy of our Tenure policy.

All residents have a dedicated neighbourhood housing officer (NHO) for their area.

NHOs are here to make sure you have everything you need and complete visits throughout your tenancy to make sure you’re happy in your home.

To find out who your NHO is and for more information, please visit our Tenancy services page.

We aim to deliver excellent services, but recognise that sometimes things go wrong, and you may want to make a complaint.

You can make a complaint and find lots of information about complaints, including a frequently asked questions and a useful video guide about to what expect when you make a complaint, on our Complaints page.

In addition to making a complaint on the complaints page, you can complain to any member of West Kent staff, or contractor, in any way that suits you:

• Use the online form on the complaints page
• Email to help@wkha.ork.uk
• Call us on 01732 749400
• Write to us at 101 London Road, Sevenoaks, TN13 1AX
• In person by arranging a meeting with us or if you live in a scheme, via the staff onsite.

If you need extra support to complain or need us to make reasonable changes to our process because of protected characteristics, including, but not limited to, disability, health or any cultural or religious reasons, please let us know.

You can find all you need to know about your rent, including how to pay and how we set our rents and service charges, our the Your rent page.

There’s lots of information available in the Looking after your Home section of the site, including repairs priorities, responsibilities and how to report repairs. You’ll also find information about damp and mould some useful self-help repairs videos.

Details of which repairs are our responsibility and which are yours can be found on the Repairs page. You can find full details in the ‘Your Home, Your responsibility’ policy.

We have a legal responsibility to carry out regular safety checks and it's important for your safety, and the safety of your family and neighbours, that you let us into your home to take care of these when we ask.

In the Safety in your Home section, you’ll find lots of information about how we keep homes safe, and health and safety advice for you, in the following areas:

• Fire safety
• Gas and electrical safety
• Water hygiene
• Asbestos
• Lifts
• Radon gas

We’re responsible for making sure that the community you live in is clean, safe and well-maintained. That’s why we created a new set of estate standards that clearly set out what you can expect from us.  

You can find out more on our Estate Standards page or by reading the full Estate Standards document.

The Help for Residents section of the website includes lots of information on available support.

We can offer you free one-to-one information, advice and support with housing-related issues, including managing your home and tenancy, tackling debt, or finding work.

There’s also important information around how we support in areas such as anti-social behaviour and crime, domestic abuse and safeguarding. 

Our Rent a Home section contains useful information about renting a housing association home.

To apply for social rented housing in Kent you must first be accepted onto a housing register for the area where you want to live by applying to Kent Homechoice. If you're eligible, you'll be able to bid for the homes advertised there. 

If you’re a West Kent tenant thinking about exchanging, you can find information about mutual exchange on the Exchange your home page.

All of our main policies can be found on our Policies page.

Policies are broken down into four main sections:

• Living in your home
• Your community
• How we’ll support you
• Other policies

You can find information about our development programme in our Strategic Plan 2025-30.

One of our strategic objectives is increase our homes in management to 10,000. We will do this by delivering 900 new homes over the life of the strategic plan.

Information about our new homes can be found on the New and Upcoming Developments page.

Shared ownership is an affordable way of getting on the property ladder, when buying a home outright is out of reach. You buy a share, typically between 25 -75% and usually with a mortgage, then pay a reduced rent on the rest. The option to buy further shares later can also mean owning the full 100%.

You can find out more on the Buying a Shared Ownership home page or check out our Guide to Shared Ownership.