Meet Jamil

I’m Jamil, and I’m a Compliance Contracts Officer in NCHA’s Property Service team.

I’ve been at NCHA since 2008, and moved to the Compliance team when it was first set up in 2022.

Our job is to make sure that our homes follow (comply) with all the safety guidelines and legislation that come from the government. It’s a legal thing that we have to do, but it also makes sure our homes are comfortable and safe for our customers – which is the most important thing.

So we look after fire safety, water management (Legionella risk), passenger lifts (that are in our care and support homes or in general needs), and asbestos and radon management.

Before 2022 we didn’t have a team dedicated to compliance and we used external agencies to carry out a lot of the work. Now we have a focussed team, and only bring in contractors to do specialist works. There’s a lot of knowledge between us, we know what needs to be done to keep our homes safe.

Doing it this way, helps us to manage the work better and make sure we’re offering a consistent, good quality service.

I think what makes us different from other housing association property services teams, is that if we can do something ourselves – we do. We have teams dedicated to gas, teams for electrical work, to name just a few. We know what we’re doing and we’re good at it.

And that’s why we’re going to be bringing our responsive repairs in-house too from 8 April. When customers call up to report a repair, our team will be the ones doing the work.

Responsive repairs

I think it’s a good thing. We already do some responsive work – we’ll just be doing it on a larger scale now.

Our operatives take real pride in getting a job done well, so I think it’s right that it’s our guys looking after our own homes. We work for NCHA, we’ve got the logo on our shirts and on our vans, and we want to do a good job. We’ve got a reputation to keep up!