Legal & General increases support for EAC Housing Awards

Published on Wednesday 15th of July 2015

Legal & General has offered to fund exploratory work to extend the scope of EAC’s National Housing for Older People Awards and the consultation with residents that underpins them. The aim is to capture the views also of residents’ families and scheme staff in order to gain a broader understanding of what makes for successful retirement living developments.

We plan to pilot this extended consultation later this year with the help of a small number of housing-with-care providers, and to introduce a new Award category to celebrate schemes where older people like to live, family members feel their loved ones are well cared for, and staff enjoy to work.

The concept is an exciting one, and is the brainchild of Graham Precey, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at L&G, who explains how it evolved in a new post on the company’s website. He hopes that the new “360 degrees” picture of how different schemes perform in the eyes of key stakeholders will increasingly inform Legal & General’s decisions on investing in extra care housing and care home providers.

Read Graham’s blog on the Legal & General website

Welcoming L&G’s initiative, John Galvin, Chief Executive of EAC, said:

“To my knowledge, L&G’s committment to fostering improvement in the quality of care, and care environments, through the leverage of its investment business, is uniquely serious and well developed. As well as helping channel its funding into the very best care businesses it also helps EAC in its mission to provide independent information & advice to help older people decide where best to live in later life. Thanks to 5 years working with L&G, all 25,000 retirement housing estates in the UK are now able to present a profile on our website that includes an externally verified picture of what residents most value about living there. To date 1,235 have done so.”

“Once the extended consultation with residents, familes and staff is fully underway in 2016, EAC too aims to raise its game and challenge all providers to open themselves up to the challenge of giving their service users and staff a public voice.”