The impact of proactive engagement on income collection & arrears | Episode #012

The Social Housing Podcast

Let's jump back 16 months for a minute. It's March 2020 and the world is descending into what feels (and is for a lot of people) - a state of chaos. Virtually overnight... Unemployment has gone through the roof and claims for Universal Credit are higher than they've ever been. For HA's and Landlords, like Citizen, this spells out **serious trouble** "How are we going to service this debt, when so many of our tenants are facing such financial adversity?" ...was the question being asked by many HA's/Landlords up and down the country. But for Citizen Housing, this created the 'perfect' environment for the introduction of proactive engagement technology/processes. A perfect environment... that over the last year has led to their UC based arrears performance almost mirroring their general needs based arrears. And so for today's podcast conversation, Lewis Murray explores exactly how Citizen have been able to achieve that as well as how they've been able to recover over £600k in former tenancy debt in the last year. He's joined by Darren Newton & Paula Jenner, who've both been involved in the rollout of this "proactive engagement" program.