Why Swindon Borough Council has chosen NEC to deliver on its housing ambitions
Earlier this month, NEC finalised a seven-year partnership with Swindon Borough Council to help transform its housing services. In this article, we talk about the challenges facing the council’s housing team, their aspirations for the future and why an open and honest relationship will be key to effective delivery.
A partnership for the long term
In October 2023, we agreed a new partnership with Swindon Borough Council. This seven-year agreement will see NEC Housing replace a raft of disconnected systems. The goal is to build housing services that keep the customer at their heart, as Head of Housing Arlene Griffin explains:
“My team works hard to meet customers’ needs but sometimes they have to chase data before they take action. Moving to NEC Housing is about giving officers and residents the information they need, when they need it.”
Across 10,000 properties, we’ll be helping the council to plan more effectively, deliver faster, control risk and cost, and keep the improvements coming.
Getting a single view of each customer
Being able to serve their customers seamlessly means seeing everything that’s relevant in one place. Currently, their data is spread across a range of different systems and databases which makes it hard to deliver a joined-up service.
We developed NEC Housing with a one-system approach, ensuring records added by one team are immediately available to others and ready to trigger actions and alerts automatically. In repairs and maintenance, for example, it can slash the number of missed appointments, warn contractors about traffic, speed up project completion and keep a clear audit trail of key safety checks. For any individual customer, Swindon will be able to see what matters at a glance.
Engaging residents in new ways
Swindon also chose NEC Housing to help transform its relationship with its customers, as Arlene explains:
“Our customers expect efficient digital services, and that’s what this project will deliver. But we’re also aiming for more. We want to get on the front foot and work alongside them, collaborating as we improve what we do. We felt that NEC is leading the way in this area, and we’re really excited for the opportunities this brings.”
As well as NEC Housing’s new Engage digital platform, the contract includes Account Analytics, which helps officers to see which residents are at the greatest risk of arrears and step in earlier to provide support. We’ll also be using our open APIs to connect to their corporate systems like finance and document management.
Finding the right way through the challenges
With a project of this scale, being honest about the challenges ahead will be key. Roger Birkinshaw is NEC’s Executive Director of Government and Housing:
“Successful projects are built on genuine partnership, and we put a lot of work into understanding Swindon’s aspirations. By thinking hard about our shared ambitions and talking openly from the start, we’ve got the right ways of working in place.”
Arlene agrees that partnership is key and that it was clear from other projects we’d worked on that we could deliver at pace:
“NEC could point to a clear track record of delivery. And from the start of the selection process we could see they were ready to share their ideas and find genuine solutions to our problems. We wanted a long term partner to help us transform our services, and while it’s still early days, we’re looking forward with confidence.”
