Evidence your influence! Talking to the regulator about tenant engagement.
Monday 27th of January 2025
Our January meetup for Local Government and ALMO engagement officers featured an ‘ask the regulators’ session and we were joined by Jonathan Driscoll and Fleur Priest-Stephens from the Social Housing Regulator. Thanks both for a super useful conversation!
It was virtual standing room only as Jonathan and Fleur fielded a range of questions from participants ranging from advice for getting young people involved to whether the regulator’s approach had changed since they started the inspections. We recorded the whole thing so, if you would like to hear what they said, watch the video here.
Following the Q&A session, participants had a chance to digest what they heard and talk about what the main messages for their organisations should be.
By far the biggest takeaway was the importance of getting data collection right – particularly relating to evidence of the impact being made by tenant engagement. Here are some examples of what participants said in the chat:
- Evidence of influence is key to compliance with the Transparency, influence and accountability standard
- We should focus on the outcome (the so what) - what has changed as a result, what are we doing about it and when will our tenants feel the difference
- The importance of evidencing engagement and the outcomes and difference that have been made
- The need to record everything to show evidence of engagement
- Using data better to ensure equity of outcome - design services to meet all needs - continually review and test to ensure continuous improvement
- Have a good understanding of your tenant base and USE the data to proactively shape services. Also plan to keep that data up to date!
Participants were also asked for their ‘top tips’ that might be shared with colleagues. Here is a selection:
- Ensure that you have up to date policies and procedures.
- Look at the previous meet up video where we talked about inspection experience
- Be honest and have an action plan on how you are working to improve
- Ensure other services have ownership of tenant engagement and are feeding back to residents what difference they have made to services and policies
- Having a database of engagement from the whole organisation, also detailing the outcomes so this is not just tenant engagement arranged activities
- Don’t copy what others are doing - do what suits your tenants and authority
- Make sure you have evidence of the impact and that actions are followed through to completion.
- Evidence how you are analysing data, if there are improvements identified, what are your improvements. Look at the standards and judgements from the regulator website.
About the meetup
The meetup took place on Zoom on 21st January 2025. We had 53 engagement officers taking part. For the ‘Ask the regulators’ section we invited participants to share ideas for questions in 5-minute breakout rooms before these were added to the chat. To help pick out the most popular, the thumbs up emoji was used as a form of informal voting. Whilst everyone else was muted with their cameras off, Dave picked questions from the chat to put to Jonathan and Fleur. This part of the session was recorded.
The second half of the session we had our regular ‘nine-minute networking’ – two nine-minute rounds of discussing two talking points in groups of 3 or 4. The two talking points were ‘What’s the main message to take back to your organisations?’ and ‘What’s a top tip to share with other engagement officers?’ We finished, as always, with ‘open space’ – an opportunity for participants to raise anything at all to the whole group.
Join our next meet up on 24th April 2025, book your place here
You can also join our networking networking group for LA & ALMO staff members, for more info click here
Session facilitated by Dave Mckenna, Tpas Associate