I AM writing in response to your front page article on March 5 entitled Homing In – councilors turn on housing group over poor service . Sanctuary Hereward s Ely-based staff work hard to provide a high level of service to residents and they have forged s

I AM writing in response to your front page article on March 5 entitled 'Homing In - councilors turn on housing group over poor service'.

Sanctuary Hereward's Ely-based staff work hard to provide a high level of service to residents and they have forged strong working partnerships with council officers across a range of functions.

I would like to reassure residents that repairs and maintenance continue to be our number one priority. Most are sorted on time and without any difficulties but with more than 2,000 repairs every month, sometimes things go wrong and when they do we try to learn from them. We do this by asking all residents to complete a satisfaction survey after every repair which allows us to monitor performance and address areas of weakness. Recent survey results have identified issues with one contractor and we would like to reassure residents that we have put in a set of procedures to ensure performance improves and that all residents get the level of service they quite rightly deserve.

I would like to set the record straight with regards to the article misquoting us as being disappointed by the service provided by contractor, R G Francis. In fact R G Francis is one of our best performers with tenants reporting a high satisfaction rate.

As for Cllr Fred Brown's comments that the local authority thinks we are letting them down and not listening to them I would like to remind him that we have invited councilors to continue to participate in the work of Sanctuary Hereward, but so far they have not responded to any of our meeting requests and have declined a place on our new forum with residents. I would suggest that having a direct conversation with us about their concerns would be a lot cheaper than the arbitration proceedings they referred to, and we would very much welcome their contribution.

We want to continue to maintain close working relations with the council - always have done, since 1993, and I hope always will.

We don't claim to be perfect but I would like to reassure residents and councilors that we do listen to their concerns and do our very utmost to put things right.

NICK ABBEY

Group director (housing)

Sanctuary Hereward