Scotland Housing Awards 2025

Read all the shortlisted entries into this award category, housing organisation of the year, at the Scotland Housing Awards (SHA) 2025 and find out who won the award on the night.

This award recognises the social landlord or letting agency that has delivered a truly excellent service for their tenants over the past year.

This award was sponsored by Scottish Federation of Housing Associations.

Winning project name

BHA - Realising the power of home

Winning organisation

Berwickshire Housing Association

Statement of support

At Berwickshire Housing Association (BHA), our vision is ‘to realise the power of home’ for our 2,000 customers in the Scottish Borders. We believe we are a sector-leading organisation through our approach to domestic abuse. Our commitment to the CIH ‘Make A Stand’ pledge inspired a Scottish Borders-wide approach with Borders Housing Network (BHN) colleagues in Scottish Borders Housing Association, Eildon and Waverley Housing Associations joining us to make a collective recommitment in 2023, following the Policies not Promises report. Our chief executive has shared her expertise and insights on a Scottish Housing News podcast around the developing Housing Bill around domestic abuse and similarly, as a sector leader, Michelle actively encourages other chief executives that domestic abuse is everyone’s business and spoke at the SFHA national conference on the issue earlier this year and is due to appear at the Housing Community Summit in Liverpool later this year. BHA also supported the development of the domestic abuse toolkit with the SFHA and hosts all-colleague domestic abuse training, with specific and focussed sessions for colleagues depending on their role. We lead a group of colleague volunteers from the wider BHN to form domestic abuse workplace support (DAWS). This year, we’ve also been one of seven providers to access national homelessness prevention funding and the only provider with a focus on domestic abuse support in line with the new aspects of the upcoming Housing Bill.

It’s been a challenging few years for a small rural housing association like BHA. Each of our neighbourhood managers look after around 350 homes, complimented by tenancy sustainment and income teams to support our customers to thrive. National charity Penumbra provides specialist mental health and tenancy support through our highly regarded BeWell service, and more locally, our BHN Warm and Well service supports with metering issues and energy debt. Our values Brilliant Basics, Learn and Grow, Inspire Together and Embrace Change provide foundation to our aim of outstanding customer experience and doing what we say we’ll do. Our ‘Customer Connect Visits’ have seen us prioritise our customer relationship and have accessed more than 85 per cent of our homes to have meaningful, supportive conversations with customers in the last 12 months, in addition to our repairs and statutory access visits. 

In late 2024, we’ve moved to a new repairs framework model which has added flexibility and improved services to our customers. By year end 2024/25, we’ve received a 50 per cent increase in contractor compliments. Our feedback following repairs being carried out went from around 73 per cent satisfaction in early 2024, to a current position of 94 per cent satisfaction, with some of our contractors achieving 100 per cent across all measures. 

Our commitment to making BHA a great place to work is in all we do. It is the lifeblood of what we do to ensure we retain good people, attract good people who feel rewarded, motivated and determined to deliver an outstanding customer experience for our communities. We’ve transformed our engagement approach, providing all colleagues a platform and opportunity to share their views and develop themselves. We use our collective networks alongside creative use of our development budget to ensure colleagues can access opportunities to develop themselves and their career. We’re passionate advocates of professionalism, with most of our colleagues holding CIH qualifications. Since 2021, we’ve invested in the GEM Programme as well as many specialist qualifications to help us increase the skills of our people. In 2025, our director of customer and communities was elected as the next vice president of the CIH, pending the AGM later this year.

Outcomes and achievements

We’ve used this section to share more around our work to make BHA a brilliant place to work that empowers colleagues to deliver outstanding, person-centred service to our customers. Psychological safety is a top priority in our business plan – already our work has colleagues feeling increasingly comfortable to speak up, admit mistakes, display vulnerability without fear of repercussions. We’ve developed behavioural maps rooted in our values – our approach has delivered so much in terms of performance, innovation and trust. All our work is focused on delivering outstanding services to our customers. This key strand of our change programme has strengthened our approach to wellbeing, health and safety of our people working patch based in our communities. We’re immensely proud of our progress on psychological safety since launching this in 2023, especially so since launching Hive in September 2023. Hive is a peer to peer recognition tool – since launching, colleagues have sent and received over 2000 messages of thanks and recognition to each other linked to our values. Our collaborative culture and approach to support for colleagues to go out and be brilliant in our communities resulted in BHA being listed as one of the Sunday Times Best Companies in 2025.

Shortlisted entries