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This Tenant Involvement Strategy builds on our legacy organisations engagement opportunities and sets out how we will listen and engage our tenants.
This underpins our continued commitment to co-regulation by involving tenants in scrutinising, shaping, co-designing and influencing services.
This co-created strategy will help us to plan and set goals and priorities to get us where we want and expect to be. It will help us stay focussed on what is important.
Our vision for our Tenant Involvement Strategy is simple.
“To engage and involve tenants and use their insight to influence and improve services and to ensure their voice is heard in decisions that affect their home, their safety and their communities”
To support the delivery of the strategy, we have developed three key outcomes. These outcomes were developed with tenants and are:
This strategy sets out how we will do this and we will produce an action plan to detail how the strategy will be delivered.
We met with the existing engaged customers from the legacy organisations and listened to what was important to them and what they wanted to see in the new involvement framework. Tenants and officers then formed a steering group to work together, share ideas and discuss the next steps in more detail. This strategy is a result of this work.
In April 2024 the Regulator of Social Housing introduced four consumer regulatory requirements that housing providers must adhere to.
The transparency, influence and accountability standard has six required outcomes and these are:
2.3.1 The council plan
This Tenant Involvement Strategy will support the delivery of our Council Plan (2024 to 2028) which sets out the council’s vision, ambitions and priorities for the next four years, as well as the approach we will take to achieve them.
The plan addresses the exciting opportunity provided by the creation of North Yorkshire Council to transform services, drive innovation and improve outcomes. It also outlines the many significant challenges ahead including the impact of inflation, increased demand for our services, climate change and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on our communities.
Here is a summary of what the plan entails:
Our vision: We want to build on North Yorkshire’s natural capital, strong local economy and resilient communities, to improve the way local services are delivered and support a good quality of life for all.
Locality working is a key element to the council plan, with the plan outlining our four pillars of locality working:
2.3.2 North Yorkshire housing strategy
We provide over 8,000 homes across the county and have ambitions for growth. Most properties are socially rented properties, but we also manage leasehold properties and a small number that are shared ownership.
We aim to become an exemplar landlord, providing high quality tenancy services. Our North Yorkshire Housing Strategy commits to ensuring our council housing stock remains decent and continues to improve. We will meet this challenge by:
2.4.1 Introduction of the measures
In April 2023, the Regulator of Social Housing introduced Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) aimed at helping improve standards for people living in social housing. They enable the regulator to see which landlords may need to make improvements but are also a way of enabling tenants see how well their landlord is performing.
2.4.2 North Yorkshire Council TSM results 2023-2024
The results give us up to date information of our tenants’ perception of our current services. The 2023-2024 Tenant Satisfaction Measures survey results tell us that in terms of engagement:
Whilst there are some good areas of overall satisfaction, there is some work to do particularly in relation to positive contribution to neighbourhood, anti-social behaviour handling and being kept informed, which are the lowest ratings in the survey.
This strategy aims to help us improve satisfaction with these important measures.
3.1.1 Bringing services together
Following local government reorganisation and the bringing together of the former council housing services, we have a new structure to deliver services and resources have been increased to support the delivery of this strategy. Tenant involvement has always been important to us, but we also recognise that we need to do more to meet tenant expectations, as well as meet the new requirements of the regulator.
We take our responsibility seriously in respect of gaining the trust and respect of our tenants. We will ensure that this strategy and engagement framework does not lose sight of the realities of the tenant experience.
3.1.2 The tenant involvement team
To tackle some of these challenges at pace and put us in a strong position to build on the legacy organisation’s engagement opportunities, we have established a dedicated tenant involvement team. Local government reorganisation was an opportunity for us to invest in our services and this new team is made up of a Tenant Involvement Manager and three Tenant Involvement Officers. We want to create new opportunities to address the gaps that exist, strengthen our offer and amplify the voice of our customers.
To enable us to address the gaps and to ensure we deliver fair and equitable outcomes for our tenants, we need to collect and understand relevant information and data to understand their diverse needs. This includes those that arise from protected characteristics, language barriers and any additional support needs.
We deliver services to a diverse range of people and so its important that we understand more about them so that:
Improved data collection and analysis will also enable us to tailor our services and take appropriate action in areas such as anti-social behaviour and repairs.
3.3.1 Regulatory judgement
In May 2024, we self-referred to the Regulator of Social Housing because a range of issues were identified following a self-assessment against the standards. The issues included a lack of reliable information to support our understanding of and response to the diverse needs of our tenants and limited and inconsistent meaningful opportunities for tenants to influence and scrutinise our services.
In August 2024, the regulator published a regulatory judgement specifically in relation to outcomes in the Safety and Quality Standard and Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard. The conclusion was a C3 grade and significant improvement is needed.
What we do and how we do it, is in line with our council values: to be inclusive, ambitious, creative and together.
Tenant involvement is a term used to cover many different tasks and activities but what it means to us is that we will give tenants the opportunity to scrutinise our services, to shape and help improve them. We are committed to keeping tenants informed.
We will be ambitious in our plans, ensure the opportunities are available to all and we will come up with new creative ways of working together.
We will aim to make it easy
This new strategy will recognise our commitment to involving tenants in scrutinising, shaping, co-designing and influencing services. We consider and value all interactions with customers as a source of feedback and engagement and tenant engagement includes everything from ad hoc contact such as a call to the Customer Service Team or a conversation with an operative at home, through to taking part in a transactional survey, consultation group or being a scrutiny panel member. We will aim to make it easy to give feedback.
We will involve those with a direct experience
We will tailor the approach for different customers and depending on the issue and customer needs, our wide range of engagement opportunities will be tailored to different customer preferences and needs. We will consider the barriers to involvement and then actively seek out feedback from tenants from a diverse range of backgrounds and communities.
We will consider the wider tenant voice
We recognise that each type of engagement may not be representative of all customer groups and opinions. Where we consult with a smaller group of customers, we will seek to test this with a wider group where possible. We aim to ensure that feedback overall is broadly representative of all relevant customer groups. We will take additional steps to ensure that customers are not excluded by tailoring our tools and approach to listen to and celebrate diverse views.
We will offer choice
We will offer a blended approach to involvement, with the development of a new digital engagement platform offering digital methods of engagement to widen the pool of engaged customers. We will support tenants to get involved in a way that suits them and ensure they are offered the required training to enable them to do this.
We will be open and honest
We will be clear about what we are hoping to achieve with input from customers and tenants, what other feedback we have received and what will happen when. We will communicate clearly and regularly the impact feedback has had.
In accordance with the Transparency, Accountability and Influence Standard, we will support tenants to exercise their Right to Manage, Right to Transfer or otherwise exercise housing management functions.
We have made a number of promises in relation to our approach to tenant involvement and therefore to show tenants our commitment we will:
There will be a range of opportunities for involvement, some more formal than others and some requiring more a time commitment.
The Scrutiny Panel examines how well we deliver our housing service and will work on an annual plan of specific topics focusing on areas that are under performing or where there is poor tenant satisfaction. This group will be tenant led and is an opportunity for tenants to work more strategically to influence services.
This Tenant Voice Panel is open to all tenants and leaseholders and is led by an elected tenant chair and committee. The purpose of the panel is to enable tenants to be involved in the review of policies and procedures or other aspects of service improvement. The Tenant Voice Panel is supported by a meeting every quarter. Meetings will take place in one of the council offices with the option to join the meeting online via Microsoft Teams and at the forum we will present our quarterly performance report and provide updates against our improvement plan. This group will link to the officer led Housing Improvement Board and our elected member overview and scrutiny committee.
The purpose of these groups is to enable members of the Tenant Voice Panel to be part of shaping any detailed work on service improvement and policy. It could also include bite size scrutiny work and these groups often only require a short-term commitment.
Tenant involvement does not always mean having to go to a regular meeting or becoming a committee member, many people find this option too formal or do not have the time or commitment for it. My Housing Voice is our digital involvement offer and there is a menu of opportunities that are flexible and don’t require tenants to big time commitment
These include:
We will use social media and electronic communications to widen the reach of our consultation or engagement requirements.
The Editorial Panel will support and influence our tenant communications including our printed materials, website and social media.
The panel will also generate ideas for the Open Door (our newsletter for tenants) and support the creation of the annual report.
This role is for anyone who wants to work with their local community. They may represent tenants within a scheme, or community and provide a link between tenants and our housing service. They will not advocate for tenants but will represent tenants are the Tenant Voice Forum.
We want to speak to as many tenants as possible to find out what they think and what matters to them. By hearing from many voices, we can build a service that we know reflects tenants’ priorities. We will be out in the community throughout the year, visiting tenants and holding community pop-up events listening to tenants.
Being an involved tenant can bring lots of rewards including:
It is important that staff and involved tenants have the necessary skills to be involved at a level that suits them to allow us to achieve our objectives and we will offer the following training and support:
It is essential that we monitor and share the difference tenant involvement has made. Tenants have told us that they want more feedback on things that have changed because of the work they have undertaken. We have committed to sharing the results and we will monitor if our strategy has been successful through the following measures: