Issue - meetings

The Assistant Director of Housing Management & Enforcement and the Tenant Participation Officer presented the draft Strategy to Members.  Preliminary works had been taking place on this area for the last 12 months by an internal group, as a result of the Social Housing White Paper 2020, which required Councils to overhaul their approach to tenant engagement and involvement.  The Tenant Participation Review and Development Group consisted of five tenants, 5 Members and officers.

The Social Housing White Paper (2020) “The Charter for Social Housing” emphasised the importance of tenant engagement and set out what the Regulator of Social Housing required from landlords.  The White Paper also outlined a set of required Tenant Satisfaction Measures, which came into force in April 2023.  This placed a statutory requirement on landlords to collect tenant satisfaction data on a number of housing related areas.

The Strategy set out four clear objectives:

• To make tenants and leaseholder engagement an integral part of the housing service, ensuring that officers and contractors understood that it was a shared responsibility.
• To strengthen and develop communication methods ensuring tenants were offered a number of ways to get involved and was accessible to all.
• To be more accountable for the services that the Council delivered by empowering its tenants to challenge the Council and to get involved in setting priorities.
• To use customer feedback to improve the Council’s housing services and keep them informed about how their contributions had been used to drive continuous improvement.

The Strategy and Action Plan would be reviewed annually by the Group following approval by Executive and Council.  A key aim was to increase digital and online channels of engagement, however, with 50% of tenants in older people’s accommodation it was important that the Council used a variety of methods to ensure all tenants could engage.

The current draft had been approved by the Review Group and was now going out to tenants for comment as part of the upcoming newsletter.  There would be a variety of ways to respond, and feedback would be reviewed further prior to submission to Executive in September.

The Chair noted that it was very important to have a variety of communication and engagement channels and that as a Council it was vital to acknowledge that not all tenants may want to engage.

Moved by Councillor Victoria Wapplington and seconded by Councillor Louise Fox

RESOLVED that (1) the draft strategy and action plan be noted,

(2) a monitoring update on the action plan be presented to scrutiny on an annual basis.

(Assistant Director of Housing Management & Enforcement/

Tenant Participation Officer)