Notting Hill housing staff complain to TSA over job selection process
Notting Hill redundancies spark anger
Staff facing redundancy from Notting Hill have complained to the Tenant Services Authority about the way the housing association chose who would get the axe.
The employees at Notting Hill are angry about the selection process for the redesigned housing officer jobs being rolled out across the organisation. A total of 135 staff, including housing officers, surveyors, managers, call centre workers and income collection staff, went through selection tests, including role play with an actor, an in-tray exercise and an interview covering competencies.
Several staff who failed the tests said the questions were unrelated to housing skills. One example included a role play of advising a tenant on setting up a business. They added they were told they could appeal the test procedure up to two days after the test but could not appeal the results, which took five weeks to arrive.
One member of staff who preferred to remain anonymous said: ‘The assessment had nothing to do with housing ability. They are getting rid of housing staff and will take on call centre staff and train them to be housing officers.’
A spokesperson for Notting Hill said about 45 staff had not got jobs in the restructured organisation currently. But she added some may yet get jobs elsewhere in the organisation.
The restructure will see the association move away from specialist teams covering jobs like repairs and income collection and bring all work for each geographical area under the control of a housing officer.
The spokesperson added: ‘We have been very clear that people are being assessed on a range of behavioural competencies rather than their housing experience.’ She said the organisation was open to considering an appeal of the assessment process. She said staff had been offered training on how to approach the assessments.
A spokesperson for the TSA confirmed the regulator had received a complaint letter but it was primarily a matter for the association’s board.
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Readers' comments (49)
Anonymous | 23/07/2010 9:59 am
Redundancies are never easy, however you do it (having been through 2 myself). Surely if you are trying to do more work with less staff you would want to keep the best ones and make redundant the not so good ones, that is common sense?
Competancies is really the only way to do this and as we all know, experience is just one small part of doing a job. Just because you have done something for a long period of time doesnt mean you are any good at it, it just means you have done it for a long time!!!
A very sad time for all (we are going through the same thing and it is being done quite rightly on competancy and ability and absence), but surely you would want to keep those who do a better job however painful it might be for those who lose theirs?
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Anonymous | 23/07/2010 10:08 am
Getting call centre or front line staff to offer a variety of services. A classic way of saying anyone can do your job! Public Sector cuts here we come.
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Anonymous | 23/07/2010 12:39 pm
Competency assessments are a fair, unbiased and objective way of measuring an individual's ability to do a job. However, they MUST be relevant and appropriate to the role. This has most certainly not been the case at Notting Hill - the whole exercise stinks and its main purpose been designed to see off highly qualified, committed and professional staff as part of a cost-cutting exercise and replace them with people who might have the desired customer service "soft skills", but who will have no knowledge or expertise in Housing disciplines. It is an insult to those members of staff who have been affected by this exercise to suggest that it's a way of getting rid of those whose performance is not up to scratch as this most certainly is not the case. Highly committed, long serving and professionally qualified staff with wide-ranging skills and experience have been sacrificed for the sole purpose of cost savings. A very sad day for the organisation and more so for the tenants and stakeholders who will without doubt be the ones who will suffer the consequences of the organisation's highly flawed decision-making and blinkered approach. It would be interesting to know what other cost saving measures have been considered. Also, has anyone done a projection of how much it's going to cost to train up the generic call centre staff to even the most basic competency levels?
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Michael Read | 23/07/2010 12:57 pm
Competency tests are a clever way of avoiding legal action at an employment tribunal.
Too right competency tests allows old scores to be settled and prejudice to run riot.
But given draconian employment legal legislation and until someone can think of a better way of doing it that doesn't lumber the employer with a mega legal bill then this game of charades is necessary.
Advice: Wash behind one's ears. Clean your teeth. Smile. Be positive. Never mind, those rituals are not going to make any difference whatsover.
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kipzilla | 23/07/2010 1:27 pm
Since when should "long service" be a criteria to be considered? It just shows that you fear change or have not got the skills to make it anywhere else.
"Long service" isn't taken into account for tenants, they would be evicted for arrears regardless of how long they have been tenants.
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Sidney Webb | 23/07/2010 2:14 pm
It was a great film though!
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Anonymous | 23/07/2010 8:55 pm
Notting Hill has employed a very dubious and cynical tactic to get rid of staff by way of introducing an assessement centre which on paper is a way of selecting the best staff but in reality is a clear out of staff whom they now deem to be surplus to requirements.
The introduction of the new way of working otherwise known as altogether better has seen qualified and accredited CIH housing officers now being replaced by call centre staff, we now have a situation whereby we have housing managers in place who have no housing experience or knowledge, decants, mutual exchanges or squatters are foreign terms and processes to these people. I suppose we we now be delivering housing services by way of google.
At present we have been told that in our current position as housing officer there is a 60% match to the position of housing officer in the "ATB" structure, we have asked that why is it that existing qualified staff cannot be trained in the area(s) that they are 40% deficient in. Notting Hill have countered that all that is required to be a housing officer is a can do attitude, they have now gone to spend over 200k on an assessment centre to weed out qualified staff and now label them as incompetent and line them up for redundancy. Unqualified call centre staff have now beenn appointed housing officers and need 100% training. It should also be noted that this is the same organisation that abolished carers leave and dependants leave as it was too expensive, last year, 35k was spent on this, a far cry from the 200k spent on this witch hunt.
Altogether better has actually become altogether worse. Notting Hill is on the verge of implosion and the careers of decent hardworking qualified staff are being jeopardized because of an action plan which with the best will in the world is doomed
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| 23/07/2010 10:59 pm
"A spokesperson for the TSA confirmed the regulator had received a complaint letter but it was primarily a matter for the association’s board."
So that was the response of the so-called "regulator" was it? What a joke the TSA was, right from the start. Sorry, we are regulator; please take your complaint back to the organisation that we are supposed to regulate but can't and won't. So easy to see why Shapps is getting rid of them.
Pursuant to CW's earlier idea in posts passim, is there really any reason why HA's cannot be scrapped in their entirety and converted into Co-Ops? This surely fits with the localism agenda and the desire to shake the tree of the public sector in order to remove the timeserving and incompetent management lodged in the branches for far too long now?
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Anonymous | 24/07/2010 3:15 pm
The time has come dear Housing friends that we all throw in the towel and accept that our experience and qualifications mean nothing. A new model army of new fresh faced happy clappy young things will soon take our place, say yes to everything the tenant wants, and never deals rigorously with housing issues. The new staff are always cheerful, and therefore never has any complaints from customers. Who cares that the estates become no go areas, where no tenant has any fear of legal action for ASB or arrears, as long as the staff smile.
No more Housing Diplomas for us, I believe that there is a well known fast food burger joint that has a college where we can learn all we need, and get stars on our badges as well!
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Dave Hollins | 24/07/2010 3:40 pm
If you type Notting Hill Housing into the IH search what an amazing collection of stories you get. Quite a few are about strikes and staff dissent, some are about problems with their gas servicing, and a couple are about them swallowing up other housing associations to get bigger for its own sake. How many are about building homes for Londoners or improving services for tenants? Well, none that I could see. How sad it is that this once great organisation has sunk so low.
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