For the people living in our retirement living schemes across the country, the threat posed by Covid-19 made many customers feel anxious about keeping safe.

As the pandemic developed, our teams had to react quickly and make decisions to keep our colleagues and customers safe, minimising the spread of the virus. Instinctively, we were carrying out our work remotely where we could, we reduced visits to our retirement living homes and we locked down communal areas to try and prevent the spread of infection.

Visits were still happening and we reached out further by telephone to those customers who we knew needed a voice to speak to in an effort to tackle feelings of loneliness and isolation - another side-effect of Covid.

A lot of our decisions had to be made quickly and we know that we didn’t always get the best information to you at the right time.

As a result of this feedback, our Retirement Living team have been busy having more conversations with our customers and finding out what’s most important to them. This is helping us to build a new, more interactive service which gives customers more opportunities to play a bigger role in their communities through volunteering and other projects.

As we’ve started to bring back more of our team back into our retirement living spaces, the focus has shifted away from thinking about what barriers our customers are faced with, and more about what they can do to make their community a better place to live.