Resident involvement and empowerment

Consultation - regulatory requirements

Social housing landlords are required to ensure that residents are given a wide range of opportunities to influence and be involved in:

• the formulation of their landlord’s housing-related policies and strategic priorities
• the making of decisions about how housing-related services are delivered, including the setting of service standards
• the scrutiny of their landlord’s performance and the making of recommendations to their landlord about how performance might be improved
• the management of their homes, where applicable
• the management of repair and maintenance services, such as commissioning and undertaking a range of repair tasks, as agreed with landlords, and the sharing in savings made, and
• agreeing local offers for service delivery

Resident consultation

Consultation is any activity that gives residents a voice and an opportunity to influence important decisions. Some consultation is statutory (your landlord must do it) and some is non-statutory. There are various methods that landlords use to consult with their residents; some of these are shown in the table below.

Shaping services

Effective systems to review services might include:

• a systematic plan to review frontline services so that residents are clear when particular elements of the service will be reviewed
• leadership of the review by a team including residents, staff and possibly governing body members
• gathering evidence that feeds into the review (such as survey data, evidence of dissatisfaction, focus groups, the use of resident sounding boards, resident inspection and mystery shopping reports, performance data, benchmark information and information on best practice used elsewhere)
• collating this evidence in a resident friendly fashion to enable residents to challenge emerging conclusions and to enable informed debate between members of the review team
• changes to policies, procedures and systems that are then fed back to residents to show how their input made a difference.

For a co-operative, service changes would require a General Meeting to be held to agree the changes.

Resident panels – decision making

Resident management and control: Resident controlled housing organisations (e.g. co-operatives and tenant management organisations) are examples of Resident Panels who manage and/or own their homes.

Committee membership

There is an automatic right for all members to become a committee member if a co-operative is run by a management committee.  All members are on the committee if the co-operative is run by general meeting.