Trafford Housing Trust

Trafford Housing Trust is a housing association based in Trafford. It owns and manages about 9000 properties. It also provides care and support for disabled people and runs sheltered housing and extra-care homes. It owns Laurus Homes, which builds affordable homes for sale. It was created by a transfer of housing stock from Trafford Council in 2005. It set up the award-winning Limelight centre in Old Trafford in 2017.

In 2018 it was part of a scheme with Great Places Housing Group, Trafford Council, and Irwell Valley Homes to turn unoccupied office space into night shelters for homeless people and donated £5,000 for essential items.

It has set up a joint venture with Galliford Try to build homes in Partington next to Carrington Moss. About 500 will be sold and 74 will be available for shared ownership or affordable rent.

In 2019, L&Q acquired THT.

Trafford Housings tenancy files were split across 3 sites, in storage areas that were not easily accessible and required dedicated resources to collect documentation on the instruction of various departments at the trust.  THT was also relocating to their brand new offices and wanted to accumulate all files which can be easily accessed by the administration and support staff to provide services to their tenants and meet their SLAs. An initial review of documents also highlighted that some of the records had been misfiled over a number of decades due to the inadequate and inefficient storage space & processes.  In order for the trust to maintain its responsibility of responsive customer services to its tenants and the wider community, a solution was needed to address the failings of the existing manual hardcopy based paper file system.

By establishing collaborative ways of working at the project outset, Pearl and Trafford Housing were able to establish a scope of work, developing a deep understanding of the challenges to overcome and how to establish a file structure that would support Trafford Housings customer service workflows moving forward.

Prior to commencing the project, we took time to develop a good understanding of Trafford Housing’s record management system, usage of Serengeti social housing software, ensuring that the scanned files were produced that could be easily imported onto the system with the necessary search fields (metadata).  Pearl Scan worked with the Trafford Housings IT department to develop an import procedure, allowing for the digital files to be seamlessly transferred into the system.  

Following the achievement, a programme was developed to ensure benefits were realised as soon as possible after project commencement, focusing on the youngest files first due to higher frequencies of information required therein.

The Project was a huge success, with over half a million images being imported within a 2 month period.  As Pearl Scan is fully compliant with the recommendation of BIP PD008, it meant all documents could be securely destroyed, relying on electronic records should they be needed as evidence.  This freed up additional space at the 3 locations, which freed up administrative space that could be used to meet the core aims of the trust.