Barnsbury is a small housing association that provides low-cost affordable homes across Islington, London. Formed in 1967, the provider was originally set up to save properties on Barnsbury Street from being demolished. Since then the provider has continued to grow and began developing its own estates in the 1970s. Barnsbury HA now manages 300 properties across the borough. 

Gas Tag was procured by Barnsbury HA to support it to increase the efficiency and transparency of its gas compliance process. 

Susan French, Chief Executive Officer at Barnsbury Housing Association, explained: “We’re a small neighbourhood housing association with limited staff resources and so we are always exploring ways in which we can work as efficiently as possible. 

“When we reviewed our gas compliance process it was clear that we could improve our reporting and increase our overall visibility of gas compliance. All of our gas works are carried out by a locally-based contractor and while they completed great work and had a fantastic relationship with our customers, they didn’t have an efficient way of collating the data we needed.”

The easiest option for Barnsbury would have been to partner with a larger contractor that offered more reporting functionality. However, the provider was keen to continue its working with its current contractor and also wanted to develop skills internally rather than completely outsource the compliance function. 

Susan continues: “It was clear that any compliance product we procured had to be able to meet our key requirements of improving compliance visibility, integration with our current contractor and support internal skills development. 

“Gas Tag offered us the ability to completely revamp our gas compliance while also supporting our current contractor to deliver the service we needed and reduce admin. The system was also easy to use which was important as we were still developing the IT skills of our staff and wanted to ensure they would be confident in using the system.”

Once Barnsbury procured the Gas Tag platform it began investing in developing internal skills and building the confidence of its employees. However, due to the simplicity of Gas Tag staff were able to start using the system quickly. The provider’s contractor also found the app easy to use and was positive about the product. 

Unlike other products on the market, Gas Tag supports engineers with best-practice workflows in servicing and repairs. This means that Barnsbury’s contractor completes every job in the same way and provides consistent data sets back to the provider. It also ensures that engineers can’t fail to fully complete the inspection or accidentally miss a part of the process. 

All information from the gas inspection is fed in real-time to Barnsbury’s online Gas Tag portal where Barnsbury has full visibility of its gas compliance at the touch of the button. Through the portal, Barnsbury can view its current level of compliance, monitor the quality of the work carried out by its contractor, run reports, audit work and monitor access levels. 

Susan adds: “Gas Tag has allowed us to move away from being reliant on one person using spreadsheets to manage gas and towards a shared approach to monitoring compliance. 

“It has helped us get great visibility of work completed in our properties and it has also supported our contractor who was unable to provide us with the type of system we needed moving forward. 

 “Technical solutions such as Gas Tag are vital for smaller HAs such as ourselves. They help us improve the robustness and transparency of our data despite limited resources. Thanks to the success of Gas Tag, we are now looking at how we can adopt similar approaches for other issues that we face.”