Coronavirus: our latest update

As we head into a national lockdown from Thursday 5 November until Wednesday 3 December, we have reviewed all our services and ways of working to make sure we’re continuing to keep you and our staff safe in everything we do.

Following the government guidance, which can be found on the government website we are able to continue to offer most of our services in the same way we have been doing.

The latest guidance states that tradespeople can still visit homes to carry out work, house moves can still happen and if people cannot do their jobs from home they can continue as they have been doing.

This means we will continue to operate our full repairs service, we will carry on letting our homes and where it is an exceptional and urgent situation we will have face to face appointments – if they cannot be carried out in a different way. We have such robust safe systems of working in place that our Leadership team are extremely confident we meet all the government guidance and can ensure our colleagues and tenants will remain safe.

Our safety checks will also be carrying on with our safe systems of work in place for our colleagues and contractors to follow. This will be for fire safety, emergency lighting, legionella checks, gas safety checks and lift servicing. It is really important that we can continue to do these checks to keep our tenants safe in their homes.

We have a commitment to support our tenants, and at times like this it is more important than ever. As we move into the cold winter months, it is important for us to keep running our repairs service while we’re able to do so.

We will be reducing some of our services such as The Arc and Viking Centre which will be closed to the public from Thursday, other than The Post Office which as an essential service will remain open. We will also be stopping our community projects that cannot be done in any way other than in person, and will start these back up again when it is safe and government guidance allows.

We will be asking all colleagues able to work from home to do so. This is to minimise the number of face to face contacts we’re having, to follow government guidance and help to stop the spread of the virus. We’ll also be asking that all appointments that can be held virtually are done in this way, with face coverings being worn if any do need to be in person.

We’re also in the process of getting new signage for all our communal areas in our flats and retirement schemes to encourage wearing face coverings when in any shared spaces. All our Ongo colleagues will be doing this and we would encourage all residents and visitors to do likewise to help keep each other safe.

You can read our Coronavirus specific guidance here, and we have some questions and answers that may be useful to take a look at here.

We will continue to closely monitor all government updates and announcements and will make any required changes to our services, and update you on these.