By Carol Miller, safeguarding and quality practice advisor at Weaver Vale Housing Trust.

One of our customers calls our customer hub and requests to have their locks changed. It sounds like a pretty straightforward request, doesn’t it?

But our colleagues know this could be a warning sign that something’s going on behind the scenes and this person may not be safe.

As a housing association with over 6,200 homes in Cheshire and Warrington, we’re committed to placing our customers at the heart of all we do. We strive to improve outcomes and life chances for people who live in our neighbourhoods.

These are more than words to our colleagues; we work hard to demonstrate this in our actions and behaviours and make this part of our very fabric.

Ensuring people who live in our homes are safe and healthy is a vitally important part of this. We know there’s little hope of improving lives and outcomes if people are experiencing mental ill health, the consequences of poverty, are unable to take care of their own needs, or are surviving in abusive situations.

Sadly, the experiences of people in our communities reflect what’s happening in society at large. New ONS figures show that the number of domestic abuse-related crimes in England and Wales rose by 6% in the year ending March 2021.

At Weaver Vale Housing Trust, we’re currently dealing with 60 domestic abuse safeguarding cases, compared to 37 in the same period last year.

This could partly be down to more attention rightly being placed on emotional and physical abuse in the media, but also tragically reflects the rise in cases during the pandemic.

We’re also seeing an increase in mental ill health. For example, our frontline contact centre colleagues are telling us that more customers are disclosing suicidal ideations.

This is why safeguarding is such a high priority for us and we’re always looking at how we can improve the way we do things.

Our colleagues, for example, have been trained to feel confident in handling these challenging situations. They know the questions to ask to check customers’ safety, and steps to take such as arranging welfare checks. They know some of the key warning signs that could flag an issue, such as abuse.

In response to a rise in reports, we’ve also recently nominated a Domestic Abuse Champion at Weaver Vale Housing Trust.

The way we do things has completely transformed since I joined in 2017. We realised safeguarding had to be a thread running through all our work, so my role shifted to advising, training and guiding colleagues and volunteers from across the organisation and our neighbourhoods.

As a housing association, we’re also very mindful that we’re not working alone. Our sector has always been galvanised and has worked together to make changes and achieve social impact.

This ethos is what sparked the idea to found a North West Housing Safeguarding Group, which currently brings together the expertise of ten housing associations.

Since the group’s inception in 2020, it’s gone from strength to strength. Our aims are to keep learning and sharing best practice, to strengthen partnerships, inform our work and ultimately keep everyone, including our colleagues, as safe as possible.

We’ve kept up to date with legislative changes, shared anonymised case studies and developed group-wide monitoring and benchmarking.

The group has also become an important space for informal supervision and support. We’re often exposed to harrowing and traumatic situations and, unlike in social services, there’s no formal clinical supervision in place for people involved in safeguarding in housing associations.

We’ve found this closed forum to be an important place of emotional support and guidance.

Everyone in our sector knows that what we do is about so much more than bricks and mortar. It’s about the people and families who live in our homes and their safety is paramount. That’s why safeguarding should be a top priority for every housing association.

Our hope is that we can continue to develop our understanding and approaches so that we can focus on improving lives and outcomes, in the knowledge that people are healthy and safe.