June 2024 round-up

Bookings now open! Annual Conference 2024

Following the success of last year's inaugural Social Housing Safety Network Scotland tenant and resident safety annual conference, we are delighted to announce that bookings for this year’s conference, taking place at Hampden Park, are officially open!

PLUS we have an amazing early bird special offer for you...

Have you ever wanted to do a stadium tour and museum visit at the Scottish national stadium?...well now is your chance!

The Scottish Football Museum at Hampden will take you on a football journey, the likes of which you have never been on before.

You will be able to go pitch-side, through the tunnels and sit in the changing rooms before heading to the Museum which showcases thousands of objects on display, tracing the history of football in Scotland and there is film footage highlighting some of the most memorable games and great players.

Marvel at the original Scottish Cup, the world’s oldest national football trophy and learn about the history of Scottish football from the 19th century up until today.

We have arranged a private tour at the end of each day of the conference; there are a limited number of spaces available on each day, so it's first come, first served!

For more details on the conference and the early bird special, and to book your place, please visit the website.

The website page will be updated as we confirm more sessions and details.

NEW member benefit! Training Matrix Template - Tenant/Landlord Safety

In the background here at The Social Housing Safety Network Scotland, we are always looking at ways that we can support members – over the last few months we’ve been responding to members’ requests about training and how they can map training need to job roles and responsibilities.

Our matrix shares some examples of training that is available, through Housing H&S Compliance UK Ltd, which enables teams or whole organisations to do just that… by adding your own organisation’s job titles to the columns, you can then map to the courses that are on offer.

We’ve also added in some ‘description’ examples to help you determine whether training is Mandatory, Essential, Desirable or Optional for colleagues.

All training offered by Housing H&S Compliance UK Ltd is available to Network members at a discounted price and we’ve also included the pricing within the matrix to enable quick and effective budgeting for training. Don’t forget that Network members also benefit from free webinars and get togethers which will all count towards building knowledge and skills.

Of course, you don’t have to attend training courses offered by Housing H&S Compliance UK Ltd as there are other training companies out there – just please be sure to ensure their objectives for learning match your requirements and are relevant to the social housing sector.

Visit the website for more information.

‘Back to Basics’ webinars

Thank you to those who attended our recent ‘Back to Basics: Tenant & Resident Safety Overview of Compliance’ webinar.

The webinar, hosted by Vicki Cutler, was a great introductory overview of tenant and resident safety for social landlords in Scotland. It looked at the responsibilities held by landlords to ensure the safety of tenants and residents, taking consideration of the Regulator position and the SHQS requirements to provide some of the key objectives that social landlords must achieve.

If you did miss out, we’ve added a new date to the website, along with upcoming dates for all our other ‘Back to Basics’ webinars. These are always FREE for members and can be found on our events page.

Supporting the 2024 FLAIR Conference with tenant safety workshops

On 20th June 2024, our co-founder, Vicki Cutler, who is also managing director of Housing H&S Compliance UK Ltd, was kindly invited along to deliver two tenant safety workshops for FLAIR (The Federation of Local Housing Associations in Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire) at the Normandy Hotel in Renfrew.

An excellent conference, which saw over 60 delegates and colleagues from the housing associations in the area come together to share knowledge, information and case studies. Vicki was asked to deliver a workshop around tenant safety with a remit that was pretty wide-ranging in that she could choose her own topic!!

Unable to decide on one specific aspect of tenant safety for the hour-long session, Vicki chose four key themes which were linked and relevant for attendees:

• What does the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR) expect from organisations with regard to tenant & resident safety?
• Getting assurance - what should that look like?
• KPI’s - what are these and why are they important?
• Asbestos in domestic premises (people’s homes) - a precedent has been set.

The 2 x one hour long workshops generated some excellent discussions and knowledge sharing as well as giving attendees the opportunity to share what they do in their own organisations; it was also an opportunity to showcase the work of the Network and talk to colleagues from associations that are not already members.

We’d like to take the opportunity to thank Kathleen McCutcheon, Chief Executive of Paisley Housing Association, for inviting Vicki along to host the workshops sessions and promote the Network.

If any Network member would like Vicki to support events that they are holding, where we may showcase the work that we do, then please get in touch – we’d be delighted to help.

New training calendar from HHSC

We are pleased to share the latest training calendar from Housing H&S Compliance UK Ltd & HHSC Learning for the second half of the year, which contains a jam-packed schedule of public training sessions centred around tenant and resident safety.

As always, every training course from HHSC has a discounted rate for members of The Social Housing Safety Network Scotland.

All of the training courses, delivered by subject-specialist practitioners, have been developed specifically for those colleagues operating in the social housing sector and include information that is relevant to the day to day work of many different job roles, including officers, managers, leaders and board members.

You can see the full calendar here.

Online library updates

We've recently made a few updates to the online library, including adding more Gas Safe Technical Bulletins, plus guides and documents on damp, mould and condensation. You can visit the library here (some content requires you to be logged in).

Network event: Asbestos Management in Social Housing: The Practical Approach

We’re delighted to bring you this Network event which will see one of the Network co-founders, Matt Dawes, spending a whole day talking about the key topic of asbestos management. We’ve put together a great programme for you with plenty of opportunity for discussion for what will be an interactive, info-filled day – we invite attendees to submit any questions they have ahead of the day or bring the questions with them, so that we can generate discussion and share practice and ideas amongst the group.

Visit the website for more information and to book places

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