星空传媒

It was with great interest that I read "Get what's coming to you" (9 May, page 28), the article about how to improve rent collection in which large, well-resourced housing associations featured heavily but their smaller brothers and sisters were hardly mentioned at all.

As senior housing officer of a small housing association with limited resources I felt compelled to write to tell you what we have achieved in this area.

Rockingham Forest Housing manages 667 properties in four local authority districts. By raising the profile of rent payment and using a range of traditional and innovative solutions we have more than halved our rent arrears in the past three years.

By the end of March, our combined current and former tenant arrears had fallen to 5.1%, which according to your figures puts our performance at the top of the upper quartile for the central region.

We have achieved this by finding ways to encourage good payment habits while at the same time taking a tough stance with habitual bad payers.

In addition, as an organisation we have taken collective responsibility for our rent arrears rather than seeing them as a housing management problem.

Some of the initiatives we have introduced during the past two-and-a-half years include:

• twice-yearly prize draws of six prizes ranging from 拢150 to 拢50 for tenants with clear accounts
  
• improved payment collection through www.allpay.net, which allows tenants to pay their rent by swipe card, direct debit, telephone and internet
  
• publicising rent arrears figures in tenant newsletters and posters in our offices
  
• hard-hitting mailshots at traditional times of poor rent payment
  
• linking major repairs programmes such as replacement kitchens, external doors and fencing to rent payment through our rent and improvements policy.

We recently held a meeting with tenants to launch our best value review process and we were delighted to hear that in tackling rent arrears we have not sacrificed customer satisfaction. Our customer service, including arrears recovery, was described as "perfect" and "top notch" by our tenants.

All of this goes to show that you don't have to be a big player to achieve big results.