From 1st April 2006, Midland Area Housing Association has merged to become Midland Heart.

TWO BECOME ONE AS KEYNOTE HOUSING GROUP AND PRIME FOCUS FORM 'MIDLAND HEART'

Keynote Housing Group and Birmingham-based, Prime Focus, yesterday celebrated its merger to form one group, creating 'Midland Heart', the largest Midlands based housing and community investment organisation.

The formation of the new group heralds the beginning of a new chapter for the organisation and special guest speaker, Meera Syal, the international writer, actress, director and comes from Wolverhampton, Moira Foster-Brown, Birchfield Community School in Birmingham, and Richard Farnell, chair of Midland Heart, unveiled the new group name and formally opened its new headquarters on Bath Row, Birmingham.

More than 250 guests, including the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Cllr John Hood, tenants, staff and business partners, attended the celebration ceremony and joined Midland Heart Chief Executive, Richard Clark OBE, in a toast to the group's success. Guests were also given an opportunity to tour the building and meet the teams who handle customer services, community investment, development and housing management.

The creation of Midland Heart, which formally starts operating as an integrated organisation on 1 April 2006, becomes one of the top ten groups in the country and the largest housing and regeneration businesses based in the Midlands. It is a social enterprise business that owns and manages more than 30,000 homes, has assets worth in excess of £1 billion and is set to invest more than £100 million every year in improving homes, building new ones and making many neighbourhoods more desirable and sought after places to live.

The newly merged group represents an opportunity to set new sector standards for housing management and participate actively in sustaining, re-building and developing new and established communities where the group owns and manages properties.

Comprising of five independent yet interrelated business groupings, Midland Heart, draws on a range of supporting corporate services covering; community investment, corporate strategy, development and new business, finance, information technology, legal and organisational development. Each operating business; Touchstone, Focus, Urban Heart, Focus Futures, trades under its own brand identity and operates its own voluntary board.

Five key challenges lie at the heart of the new business including; the improvement of operating efficiency, enabling the release an additional £10 million during the first three years; obtaining the decent homes standard at least two years ahead of government expectation; the improvement of customer satisfaction and becoming one of the top ten performing associations in the country; participation fully in the national housing agenda and target building an additional 6,000 new homes in the next 10 years; and finally, the integration of its multi-million pound investment programme and deliver enhanced neighbourhood services and community investment programme.

Midland Heart Chief Executive Officer, Richard Clark OBE, said; "We have a culture that pursues excellence in everything we do and we will build on the legacy of the associations who are part of the new group. Our new dynamic and flexible approach is built around five interrelated values. These form the foundations for the business and permeate through every level of the Group. They truly demonstrate our passion for working with, and for, communities. "