This has been a busy and productive year for us, with awards for our service delivery and new homes, and continued strong support services.
We were delighted to have our Charter Mark and Investors in People awards both renewed, giving external validation to the standards of our service to customers and our commitment to improvement, and to the quality of our staff and our role as an employer.
We are on course to achieve Decent Homes by 2008, have a major rolling programme of component replacement in our homes, and have comprehensively remodelled our largest estate in Exeter, providing better quality interiors and enhancing the neighbourhood.
Our new homes, most notably those at Gun Wharf in Plymouth and The Village in St Austell, have won major national design awards. These mixed-income, mixed-tenure regeneration sites have been achieved through working in partnership with residents, local councils, our consultants and contractors and our funders. Both Devon & Cornwall Housing Association (DCHA) and Partnership South West, the development partnership we lead, achieved more than their targets for the development of new homes, with DCHA completing 314 new homes in the year.
We have always been more than just a landlord, and our work in providing supported housing, foyer and care & repair home improvement agency services has continued to flourish. We were delighted that the Foyer Federation chose Plymouth Foyer for the development of one of only ten media centres in the country. Our environmental work has involved residents, contractors and staff in a whole series of initiatives in line with our evolving strategy.
We have benefited from working alongside Penwith Housing Association and have more recently welcomed Tor Homes, as sister organisations under Devon & Cornwall Housing Trust. These partnerships are already improving customer services across the group, as well as increasing our efficiency.
Residents are playing a key role in these discussions and plans, and they organised our first group-wide tenant conference earlier this summer, as well as taking part in far-reaching decisions about our involvement structure and processes.
All of this work is summed up in our new vision and aims. They provide the direction for our work, while our core values continue to give us the guiding principles of how together we will achieve our goals.
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