Following a comprehensive tender process, Two Rivers Housing has awarded two four-year contracts to PH Jones in a deal worth £6.4m.

The two new contracts build on a successful long-term partnership between the two organisations, which has seen PH Jones provide servicing and repairs to the housing association’s traditional fuel heating systems for the last nine years.  

Two Rivers Housing recently secured funding from the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund to undertake a pilot to fully retrofit a small number of its homes. This will include the installation of more efficient and renewable heating systems in these properties.

The first of the new contracts will see PH Jones take responsibility of the servicing and repair of Two Rivers Housing’s renewable systems as well as the traditional heating systems it has previously serviced.

Two Rivers Housing provides more than 4,200 affordable homes across Gloucestershire, which account for more than 90% of the organisation’s carbon emissions. The replacement of gas, oil and solid fuel heating systems in its older homes and the installation of this technology in its new build homes, will play a key part in reducing this and support its ambition to become a Carbon Zero organisation by 2050.

Following a tender through the CHIC Framework, a not-for-profit, member-owned tendering consortium, PH Jones was awarded a second four-year deal. This will see the firm complete heating system improvements, installations and upgrades to the housing association’s homes helping it to reduce its carbon footprint over the coming years.

As part of the deal, PH jones have committed to delivering employment and skills opportunities throughout the contract, alongside a number of customer focused improvements for appointment booking and tracking.

The relaunched GHCP shows the power of working #Twogether for our communities

The Gloucestershire Homes and Communities Partnership (GHCP) has released figures that show the impact its members have had across Gloucestershire in the last financial year.

Made up of seven housing associations that manage more than 35,000 homes in Gloucestershire, the GHCP has invested £150 million in housing and built 727 new affordable homes across Gloucestershire. The group also employs more than 1,600 people that live in the county.

The group is committed to working #Twogether to tackle shared challenges for housing providers including net zero, supported housing, and making sure that the voice of tenants is heard across the sector. It is also committed to investing in new homes and ensuring that social housing in Gloucestershire is warm, safe and affordable.

Our Chief Executive Hayley has stepped into the role of Co-Chair alongside Gloucester City Homes Chief Executive Guy Stenson. They will be leading the group as it works to make sure that Gloucestershire is a place where tenants feel safe, supported and are proud to call it home.

Speaking about the GHCP Hayley told us: “By coming together, we’ve been able to deliver hundreds of new affordable homes and provide stable employment for more than 1,600 people living in Gloucestershire. We know that there is more work to do, but we are proud of the impact we’ve made and will continue to work together to support our tenants and the communities we serve.”

You can find out more about the GHCP on its website: Gloucestershire Homes and Communities Partnership – Building sustainable futures together

This year so far, we’ve completed work on more than 100 homes to make them warmer and more affordable to run for our tenants. This is a brilliant start to our goal of upgrading 750 of our tenants’ homes to improve their energy ratings over the next three years.

We’ve made some changes to our team this year and now have more people working to help us fight fuel poverty in Gloucestershire.

This includes our new Customer Liaison Officer, Sally, who is there for our tenants to answer questions about the work in their homes and support them though the process.

We have three projects, each using different funding to bring homes up to an energy rating of EPC C. We’ll include a home in a project based on what energy rating it has to start with and what type of work can be done to improve this.

Our recent £4.56m from the government’s Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund will help us upgrade hundreds of homes with solar panels and improved insulation and ventilation over the next few years. We are surveying our homes at the moment to see which ones we can include in this project.

We are also using funding from the government’s ECO4 scheme to install new air source heat pumps alongside other changes in some of our lowest rated homes. We will upgrade 148 homes using this funding this year and have already completed 58!

Some of our homes have good heating systems already but need some extra upgrades to bring them up to EPC C and help reduce energy bills for our tenants. We’ve nearly finished a project to upgrade 48 homes in Newent and Sling using our own funding. We will start work on more homes in this project next year.

We’ll keep you updated as we move forward with these projects as part of our commitment to invest in improving our homes!

Meet Adam, our new Assistant Director of Data and Technology who recently joined the Two Rivers Housing team. Adam will lead our data and technology team as we look to improve the way we use technology to help our teams deliver a great customer experience for our tenants.

He joins us from Herefordshire based housing association Connexus, where he supported the team in merging multiple IT systems and improved their IT systems and processes to help them support tenants more effectively.  Before working at Connexus, he worked on international projects for Hi-Lex, a car parts manufacturer and Corrugated Technologies in San Diego California.

Our tenants have told us that our processes often feel ‘clunky’ and slow and that they’d like us to make improvements to make it easier for our team to make decisions and resolve things for them. By investing in technology to support our team we hope to streamline our processes and free up time for our frontline teams, so that they can spend their time working with tenants and doing the things that add real value to our communities.  

As part of our new corporate strategy – Delivering #Twogether 2024-2027 – we promised to review our approach to digital transformation and create a customer-focussed approach to IT and data. Adam will oversee this as we look to improve our systems and processes over the coming years.  

We asked Adam why he chose to join our team and what he’s looking forward to the most. He told us:

“I am really pleased to be part of an organisation that can make a real difference to its communities and am looking forward to being part of a community-based, local housing provider.

“For me technology is there to support the business – making it easier for our team to do the important things like supporting tenants, investing in our homes and getting out in our communities. I’m really looking forward to getting to know the team and working with them to improve our services and how we use technology to deliver for the thousands of families living in our homes.”

We’ve donated £1,000 to The Sharing Kitchen in Newent through our partnership with the Travis Perkins Social Value Legacy Fund. This local service is bringing people together to share food and tackle social isolation in Gloucestershire.

The Sharing Kitchen team set up for lunch in Newent Memorial Hall every Thursday from 12:30 to 1:30pm. They provide free meals for people to sit and enjoy with others in the community. This donation will help cover the cost of the room rental and food so that the service can run for another year.

Local organisations are invited to attend The Sharing Kitchen each week and let people know about the free support services available in the area. Our team go along regularly to answer any questions people have about housing and the services we can support them with.  Our community engagement team are also joining two of The Sharing Kitchen lunches during August to provide free crafts and snacks for children and their parents.

Recently our Executive Director of People & Neighbourhoods, Liz Evans visited to present our donation to organiser Krissie Carter and the team of volunteers. Liz said: “We are thrilled to support this amazing community project.  It’s so important in bringing people together and helping people by providing meals at time when many are struggling with rising food prices. Our local partners are so important to the work that we do and it’s great to work with The Sharing Kitchen to provide further support for the people of Newent.”

Krissie started the project in November 2024 and there is now a group of local volunteers who help set up tables, serve food and drinks, greet visitors and clean up each week. As more people have started to join the lunches, the team have expanded from the back room to the main hall to cater to everyone.

The weekly event attracts people from all parts of the community with many going along for an opportunity to socialise and make new friends, as well as to enjoy the food. The team try to provide good meals that people enjoy. Each week there is a different menu cooked by chef Jeff Steers including ratatouille, pie, salad and quiche. They’ve also started putting a fun general knowledge quiz on all the tables for people to fill in while they eat. Answers are read out at the end of the session. Social isolation is a huge problem across the UK and free-to-attend community projects like this can make a huge difference to prevent loneliness.

Working with partner organisations to support the wider needs of its communities is an important part of our corporate strategy – ‘Delivering #Twogether 2024-2027’.

Our community engagement team have a busy schedule of community events over the summer holidays. You can see what’s on here: Summer events 2025 – Two Rivers Housing

At the end of 2024, we ran some workshops with tenants to help us look at our Repairs Policy and make sure that it was fair, reasonable and clearly sets out what tenants can expect from our repairs service. Our tenants told us that:

• We need to get better at sharing information about repairs including timescales, what is an emergency, urgent and routine repair and how we communicate with tenants about repairs in their home.
• We need to be clearer on who is responsible for what in our homes including, what improvements tenants need permission for and what repairs are the tenant’s responsibility.
• We need to make sure that we collect money owed by tenants for rechargeable repairs, but we should take personal circumstances into account when chasing this and be upfront about the costs.

We’ve taken all of this feedback on board and used this to create our new Repairs Policy. We have also shared this with our Tenants Voice Group to make sure it is a true reflection of what our tenants told us they want to see.  

Our new Repairs Policy provides details on our repairs service including:

• How to report a repair.
• What we are responsible for as a landlord.
• What repairs tenants are responsible for.
• When tenants must seek permission to do improvement work and how to do this.
• How and when we will work with tenants to adapt their home to suit their needs.
• Information on rechargeable repairs and how we will work with tenants to recover costs.
• The definition of emergency, urgent and routine repairs with examples for each category.
• How we will carry out inspections to make sure the work completed is correct and of good quality.

Tenants also told us that we should focus on emergency and urgent repairs first and so we have reviewed some of our repairs performance measures to reflect that. Going forward we will aim to complete repairs in the following timescales:

• 100% of emergency repairs completed within 24 hours.
• 90% of urgent repairs completed within five days.
• 80% of routine repairs completed within 30 days.

We’ll share our performance against these measures with tenants through our communication channels so that they can see how we are doing.

We know that we still have some work to do to deliver the first-class repairs service our tenants deserve and will continue to listen to their feedback and work with them to make improvements.

If you’d like to be involved in helping us improve our services, you can find information on how to do this here: Getting involved.

You can also read view our new Repairs Policy here: Repairs Policy

We know that having a good repairs service is important to our tenants and over the last 12 months, we’ve been working hard to make the improvements our tenants want to see.

Earlier this year, our Executive Director of Homes Jonny, met with groups of tenants to review our Repairs Policy. They looked at our existing policy and talked through what was fair and reasonable, what information was missing and what needed to change.

The sessions were really useful in helping us understand the experience that tenants have had when it comes to our repairs service. It highlighted some key themes that we know we need to improve and also gave our tenants a more in depth insight into how our repairs service works and the challenges we face.

We have used the feedback from tenants to review and update our Repairs Policy, which has been reviewed by our Tenants’ Voice Group and will be shared with tenants in the next few days.

In the meantime, we’ve created a ‘You said – We did’ case study, which shares the feedback we had from tenants and how we are using it to improve our Repairs Policy and the service we provide. You can read this here: Working-Twogether-to-improve-our-services-Repairs-Policy-July-2025.pdf

We’d like to also say a huge thank you to the tenants that took the time to share their experiences and feedback with us. If you’d like to get involved and help us improve our services, get in touch with our community engagement team. Find out more here: Getting involved

Debbie Innes-Turnill has joined the Two Rivers Housing Board as a Non-Executive Director.

She is a safeguarding expert with a background in education and the Director of Debbie Innes Safeguarding Ltd a private consultancy firm. Debbie provides training, support and independent safeguarding advice to schools, charities and religious and sporting organisations and also lectures part time at Birmingham University.

Debbie is the Governor for equality, diversity and inclusion and safeguarding at The King’s School in Gloucester and holds the position of Chair of the Education and Compliance Committee.

She has previously lectured at Gloucestershire College and was Deputy Head of Widden Primary School until October 2024. She’s also worked as a consultant for Gloucestershire and Wiltshire Local Authorities where she provided expert support in succession planning, training and improving outcomes for pupils.

As part of our new corporate strategy – ‘Delivering #Twogether 2024-2027’, we pledged to strengthen our Board in key areas to help us to continue to provide the best services and support to our tenants.

As a social housing provider, our team may be among the first people to spot a safeguarding issue. So, it’s important that we make sure they understand their responsibilities and that we have the best safeguarding practices in place to support our tenants when they need it.

Debbie’s knowledge and expertise will be so valuable as we review our safeguarding practices to ensure we continue to support our tenants in the best possible way.

Debbie is looking forward to working with the team, we caught up with her recently and asked how she felt about joining the Two Rivers Housing team:

“As a safeguarding expert, I have seen firsthand the difference identifying and acting on safeguarding concerns can make. It’s great to see that Two Rivers Housing is looking to strengthen its practices in this area and help make sure that tenants get the support they need.

“I’m really looking forward to sharing my experience with the team and helping them improve their current practices as we work together to make sure we keep those living in our homes safe.”

Want to know more about our Board? Follow the link: Who’s on our Board?

Each year, we speak to hundreds of tenants to find out what it’s like to live in our homes and neighbourhoods. As part of this, we work with an independent research company called Acuity to complete telephone surveys with our tenants.

The surveys that Acuity complete form part of our annual Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs). They use a set of 12 questions that were developed by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH), tenants and landlords that focus on the things that matter most to tenants.

The questions ask tenants to share their thoughts on our repairs service, how we keep them safe in their home, how we manage our neighbourhoods and how we handle complaints.

We share the results of these surveys with the Regulator who will then publish them on its website, so that tenants can see how their landlord is performing and compare this to other providers.

So how are we doing?

Overall, 79.5% of the tenants we surveyed were satisfied or very satisfied with the service we provide and 77.8% were satisfied or very satisfied that their home was well maintained.

More than three quarters (81.0%) of tenants that had a repair completed in their home within the last 12 months were satisfied or very satisfied with our repairs service and 77.1% said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the time it took to complete the repair.

We were also pleased to see that 87.5% of the tenants we spoke to agreed or strongly agreed that we treat them fairly and with respect and 83.4% said that they were satisfied or very satisfied that their home was safe.

We know we’ve got some work to do in some areas and tenants told us that we need to get better at handling complaints, how we manage communal areas and shared spaces, how we deal with anti-social behaviour and how we contribute to our neighbourhoods.

And these are some of the areas that we will be focussing on as part of our corporate strategy ‘Delivering #Twogether 2024-2027’.

You can read our full set of Tenant Satisfaction Measures here:

Our partnership with the Eastington Community Land Trust (ECLT) is starting to take shape as work begins to build 31 new affordable homes at its Homegrounds site in Eastington, Stroud.

The homes will be a mix of flats, bungalows and two and three bedroom homes and will be available to rent and part buy through the government’s Shared Ownership scheme.

The ECLT was set up by residents of the rural village in 2016, Its purpose is to support the development of much needed affordable homes while maintaining the character and green spaces in and around the village.

#Twogether with our development team, the ECLT secured planning from Stroud District Council in April 2024. Since then, we have been working to appoint contractors, prepare the site for building, and secure funding to support the development.

Last month, our Chair Ted Pearce, Chief Executive Hayley and Executive Director of Homes Jonny Jones visited the site to see the progress that’s being made. They met with members of the ECLT, development partners GP Thomas and representatives from Stroud District Council as well as Homes England who provided financial support for the project.  

The homes are starting to take shape and are being built to meet EPC A – the highest energy efficiency rating. This means that they will be warmer and cheaper to run for the families that will move into them early next year.

As a community-based housing association, we work closely with our partners to really understand local housing need. Working with the ECLT has helped us deliver much needed affordable homes to the village of Eastington while maintaining that sense of local community – protecting its future for generations to come.

Speaking at the event, Tom Morrison, Chair of the ECLT thanked everyone involved in the project. He said: “Two Rivers Housing understand what is important to us as a Community Land Trust and have been patient and supportive throughout the process. Their collaborative approach and willingness to work constructively with us to get the planning and funding applications over the line have made them the perfect partner for this project.”

The new homes will be available in early 2026.

We’ve set up a community larder #Twogether with local partners to help provide free food to people struggling with the cost of living.

We partnered with St Luke’s Church, Salvation Army, Travis Perkins Managed Services and Sedbury Space to collect, store and distribute food to people who would otherwise find it difficult to put food on the table.

We provided a space for the community larder at our HomePlus scheme in Sedbury, and a £700 donation from the Travis Perkins Legacy Fund, was used to install a freezer at the site. The funding also helped towards stocking the larder and freezer with a range of foods from instant pasta and soup to chicken nuggets and frozen vegetables.

The food will be distributed to local people including our tenants by local Wellbeing Chaplain, Rev. Nicki Bullivant. This will help support people in the local community who are still struggling with the cost-of-living. Donations from members of the church and funding from the Salvation Army will help keep the larder stocked up with essential food items going forward and we’ll will keep the food secure in the larder for as long as it’s needed.

We’ve worked with partner organisations in the area to build relationships with the local community. Over the last 12 months, we’ve held events including breakfast clubs and pizza making workshops in Sedbury and across Gloucestershire. These events have provided a chance for tenants and other members of the community to share their thoughts with us and help us identify what further support is needed in the area.

Working with partner organisations to support the wider needs of its communities is an important part of our corporate strategy – ‘Delivering #Twogether 2024-2027’.

Hayley Selway, Chief Executive at Two Rivers Housing, recently visited the larder to see the work for herself, she said: “The cost of living is affecting everyone from young adults, families and the elderly and there is a real need for this type of support in Sedbury and across the wider Gloucestershire area. Food poverty is a current reality for so many and has in particular, significant long-term impacts on a child’s life chances. Working alongside our partners I’m really pleased that we’ve been able to support this project.”

Elliott James, Branch Manager at Travis Perkins, which provided funding for the larder said: “It is great to be able to support this community effort, which will make a huge difference for people living in Sedbury. This is the type of project that our Legacy Fund with Two Rivers Housing is there to support.” 

Elizabeth Cox, Pioneer Community Leader from Salvation Army added: “It’s really exciting to be part of this collaboration, listening to the community and helping provide the support we know is needed.”

Rev. Nicki Bullivant, Associate Priest & Wellbeing Chaplain who will help distribute food from the community larder added: “Access to this kind of support can really help people get through a difficult time in their lives. We are grateful to Two Rivers Housing for providing a space for the larder and to the Salvation Army and Travis Perkins for working with us to support our community.”

Two Rivers Housing manages more than 4,600 homes in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire and surrounding area. Its community engagement team run and support a number of local events across its communities to help support families living in these areas.