Our new approach has been co-created with tenants and involves three key elements: listening to tenants, involving them in shaping services, and holding ForHousing to account.
Everyone deserves a safe and secure place to call home. It gives us a strong foundation to build our future and our children’s futures on.
ForHousing’s mission is to provide safe, well-maintained homes and deliver customer focused, equitable and efficient services.
We are committed to continually striving to do better. Listening to tenants’ views and involving them in improving services is crucial to this.
The wider sector recognises this too. Trust between landlords and tenants has broken down and tenant engagement has rightly been in the media spotlight and high on the government’s agenda.
We need to rebuild that trust. We need to keep progressing as a sector toward a relationship where tenants not only have a voice but are heard, respected, and able to influence improvements.
In recent years at ForHousing we have been working to make this a reality in our communities. This has included a complete overhaul of how tenants can scrutinise and review our work.
We want to give tenants a real opportunity to be heard and to be the voice of their community. As a landlord, we may own the property our tenants live in, but it is their home.
Our new Raise It initiative is our fresh approach to scrutiny and it encourages tenants to do just that. To raise the issues that matter most to them. We want tenants to share their suggestions, concerns and complaints, and to positively impact the services we deliver.
Our team of eight Scrutiny Partners helped develop the Raise It initiative in partnership with staff and guidance from tenant engagement experts TPAS.
Since January 2022, these tenants have dedicated their time to research, identifying good practice, and attending and leading reflection workshops.
They recommended the new scrutiny approach be:
- Independent from governance structures,
- Inclusive in how tenants can access and take part,
- Transparent,
- Accountable, by giving tenants clear oversight of services and their impact.
Our new approach gives tenants three ways to get involved and Raise It:
- Tenants can become a Scrutiny Partner. This role involves tenants working with us to set out what will be scrutinised. They will do this by looking at how services are performing and customer feedback. Partners will also help make sure we do what we say we’re going to do to improve the customer experience.
- Tenants can take part in specific Scrutiny exercises by joining the Core Group. They will investigate how we deliver services by talking to tenants and making recommendations on what we can do better.
- Wider involvement. We understand many tenants won’t have the time to get involved in a review, but we want to hear from as many people as possible. So, tenants can also share their experiences in a variety of ways – by talking to us, completing a survey, engaging on social media or joining a focus group.
The feedback we get through Raise It will help us make an action plan to deliver tenants’ recommendations. This will be reviewed by our Customer Committee, who work with us to co-create services and hold us to account.
Our Scrutiny Partners have also played a vital role in developing our Together with Tenants Charter. Taking part in this National Housing Federation initiative is a natural fit with our new approach to scrutiny. The charter aims to improve our accountability with tenants, help us get clarity on what is important to them, and increase transparency about service improvements.
By identifying and addressing areas where we can improve, tenant scrutiny can help us raise the bar higher. It will improve levels of service and make for better communication. We are still on a journey, but there has been a genuine shift in our culture.
I’m proud that Raise It will make it easier than ever to put tenants’ views and needs at the heart of our decision-making.
We want tenants to be the voice of their community so they can have the power to positively impact services. Together, we can really make an impact, delivering quality homes and places and improving lives.
