Group signs up to Together with Tenants and works with Scrutiny Team to monitor progress
Following the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017, the Government spoke to residents to understand how they felt about their housing associations and what change was needed.
The main theme from these conversations was that residents aren’t listened to enough.
The National Housing Federation (NHF) has since created ‘Together with Tenants’ to change this, which we’ve signed up to.
What is Together with Tenants?
The aim was to strengthen the relationship between residents and housing associations.
The NHF developed a four-point plan, including a charter with six commitments setting out in clear terms what residents should expect from their landlord and how they can be held to account on these.
Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code
By signing up to the charter, we’ve underlined our commitment to:
- Ensuring our Board is accountable to our customers.
- The Together with Tenants Charter, which sets out what our customers can expect from us as their landlord
- Customer oversight of progress against the Charter.
- Giving our customers a stronger collective voice with the Regulator for Social Housing.
What does the charter involve?
Our Customer Engagement Manager carried out a self-assessment to see how we’re performing against these criteria.
The Scrutiny Team then got under way with its first project to sense-check this by carrying out their own assessment.
Helen Bird, Customer Engagement Manager, said: “I’m really pleased to see that the Scrutiny Team believes we’re well on our way to meeting all of the criteria outlined in the NHF’s Together with Tenants charter.
“There are some areas, such as publishing the outcomes from customer feedback online and responding to areas of low satisfaction, where the Scrutiny Team believes we can do more. We’re taking this on board and making changes to the way we work to address this.
“The team has also provided lots of other useful feedback, such as streamlining pages on our website, being more open more regularly about how we put things right and publishing more progress updates, which’ll be useful as we look to make more progress in everything we do.”
How to join the Scrutiny Team
We’re recruiting for new members to join the Scrutiny Team. You can either apply on The Hub or by visiting our scrutiny-team page.