The inspectors are coming!
Monday 29th of April 2024
Our topic at the April Tpas meetup for LA and ALMO engagement officers was tenant involvement in the context of the new consumer regulations – and the big takeaway is that the regulations, and the prospect of inspections in particular, are raising the profile of tenant involvement across housing services and councils more generally.
To help raise the profile further, Tpas are about to release a new report, aimed at Councils, making the case for an increased focus on tenant involvement in the light of the regulations and, well, because it’s the right thing to do!
At the meetup we were joined by Tpas senior policy advisor, Clare Powell, who has been working on this new report. Clare shared some super useful insights and, if you want to hear what Clare had to say, you can find the video of her conversation with Dave Mckenna here:
You can read the report here
The prospect of inspection certainly seems to be focussing minds. Here are some comments from participants at the meetup:
- Regulation has improved the profile of tenant engagement and has brought this to the forefront.
- The shift to proactive consumer regulation is raising the status of tenant and resident engagement - within Housing at least
- Regulations are helping Involvement have priority
- We're probably all happy that the rest of our organisation suddenly wants involvement in their services while frustrated that it took a threat of regulation to get here
- Consumer standards are helping to raise the profile of Tenant Engagement in parts of the business that haven't been involved in our service before
The conversation with Clare highlighted some practical things that engagement officers might focus on including collecting evidence of effective tenant involvement systematically in anticipation of an inspection, and working on the gap analysis – many have already started to do this. Mock inspections were highlighted as a being particularly helpful, and we also talked about how we could best capture the learning from the early inspections – something for a future meetup perhaps?
Other issues bubbling up in conversations included:
- We are all in the same boat and others are happy to share knowledge of what they are doing currently
- Continuing struggles with getting more new and diverse tenants involved
- Communication breakdowns creating issues for resident involvement
We also had a good conversation about involving young people and thought this would be also a good theme for a future meetup.
About the meetup
The meetup took place on Zoom on 26th April 2024. We had 26 engagement officers taking part. As usual, we had a series of interactive activities allowing participants to share experiences and ideas as well as trying out some engagement techniques. This time we started with ‘nine-minute networking’ – two nine-minute rounds of discussing two talking points in groups of 3 or 4, mixed up for the second round. We then had a fishbowl interview with Clare from Tpas. We finished, as always, with ‘open space’ – an opportunity for participants to raise anything at all to the whole group.
Further information
Our next meet up is on 17th July and you can book your place here
We also have an online networking group on our Tpas Connect platform. If you would like to join the group, please email lisa.holt@tpas.org.uk
For Tpas Connect info click here