About Us 
Our History 
Our History
Berwickshire Housing Association first opened for business on 1st September 1995, having completed the purchase of all the housing stock and related assets of Berwickshire District Council the previous day in Scotland’s first “Large Scale Voluntary Transfer” and following a massive 83.1% vote in favour by tenants some ten months earlier. Our main aim was ‘provision of excellent and affordable housing and housing services’
Excellent housing
We promised tenants that all houses would meet a 3 Point Standard within our first 5 years – double glazed windows, high performance external doors, and the latest standards of insulation. We completed these improvements with 6 months to spare as well as an 80-house comprehensive modernisation project at Hillview, Coldstream and several major renewals projects.
In 2000 we reviewed improvement needs with tenants and set up a second phase programme to modernise kitchens, bathrooms and heating systems. We expect to complete this by 2011. Tenants currently receive a discount where these facilities are below standard.
Since 1995 we have spent over £20 million on our housing stock.
Excellent services
We are committed to being accessible and accountable. We have 3 local offices dedicated to the provision of excellent customer service. We are also proud to support the local economy through the use of local tradesmen and contractors to deliver our repairs and improvements programmes. We hold regular local tenant meetings and all improvement projects have extensive tenant involvement. We produce regular informative newsletters and employ a Tenant Communications Officer dedicated to liaising with and obtaining feedback from our tenants.
We regularly gauge satisfaction with key services and conduct a comprehensive tenant survey every few years. Satisfaction levels have never been less than good, and commonly very good indeed. We aim to keep them that way and use the feedback to raise standards still further. In 2001 we did just that when we remodelled our Allocation Policy completely to produce homehunt, a policy that is simple to use and empowers housing applicants. This has now been taken a stage further with the introduction of Borders Choice Homes, a common housing register that enables applicants to apply for housing throughout the Scottish Borders with a single registration process.
Affordable housing
For our first five years we guaranteed rents would not rise more than 1.5% p.a. above inflation, but at the end of this period we needed to resolve serious anomalies in the rent structure. Through consultation by tenant meetings, newsletters and individual letters we devised a new rent structure and a way of harmonising rents over ten years into the new structure which gained the support of tenants and which married the harmonisation process to the second phase improvements programme (kitchens, bathrooms, heating). This also ensured a better match between our expenditure plans and our rental income, which has strengthened our business plan and made it possible for us to secure better financial terms, further helping to keep costs affordable
Excellent extra housing
We have always aimed to increase the number of rented houses, by new build, acquisition and conversion, and to make sure that all our additional houses meet our quality standards. Grant funding is essential for this work and the main grant available is Housing Association Grant (HAG) from Scottish Government. A feature of our work has been the development of gap sites and redundant buildings to enhance local communities – perhaps most notably Dunlop House, Duns and the old cinema site, Eyemouth.
Affordable housing to run
We recognise that affordable housing means so much more than cheap rents. Our very first development – 6 family houses at Hillview, Coldstream – included several energy saving features which proved very popular and prompted us to trial a range of technologies in new and existing housing to find ways of making homes cheaper to run. We try where possible to include similar systems in all our new homes, selected according to project suitability, and are still evaluating further technologies, particularly those suited to existing housing.
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