Our Tenant Involvement Strategy at Rotherham
Tuesday 7th of March 2017
Asim Munir, Tenant Involvement Coordintor for Rotherham Council talks about how Rotherham Council is determined to make Tenant Involvement central to the way that the Council’s housing and neighbourhood services works.
RotherFed, the Rotherham Tenants Federation is controlled and managed by council tenants themselves and is both independent and a key strategic partner of Rotherham Council Housing and Neighbourhood Services.
It seemed like a perfect time to revise and update the council’s Tenant Involvement Strategy in partnership with Rother Fed. Rotherham Council Housing & Neighbourhood Services are now confirmed as a Tpas accredited landlord for Resident Involvement Excellence from 2016 for a period of three-years.
This is great news, and shows how committed we are to making sure tenants’ views and input is at the heart of our housing and neighbourhood services. It reflects the strategic improvements we have made recently with regards to Tenant Involvement working alongside Rother Fed, tenants and staff. The Council will use this award to continue to raise our standards of our services working with tenants and leaseholders.
We are working hard to widen and improve the ways tenants can talk to us so under-represented groups can help to make a positive difference to the services they use. An example of this is that Rother Fed is undertaking a scrutiny review on our behalf of Young tenants and engagement.
This was also a great chance to incorporate the new Tpas Community Engagement Standards. The overall aim of our Tenant Involvement Strategy is to understand the needs, expectations, aspirations, achievements and experiences of Council tenants and to improve services as a result of this.
One of the recommendations from our Tpas accreditations was that we needed to improve on capturing and evaluating the impact of our tenant involvement activities. We aim to achieve this by following the new Tpas community engagement standards where we have already started to achieve standards 1-5. We know we need to deliver against on standard 6 ‘Valuing Engagement’ ensuring the outcomes are benefitting our tenants and leaseholders.
Following the Tpas Community Engagement Standards will enable us to consistently follow and embed good practice when we engage with our tenants.
We will continue to monitor and evaluate the impact of the strategy through the following ways:
- The Tenant Involvement Service Improvement Plan of activities included
- in this Strategy will be reviewed frequently with our tenants
- Monitor our progress against the recommendations which came out of the
- Tpas accreditation to achieve maximum improvement over the next three years
- Monitor our progress against the Tpas Community Engagement Standards
- Continued monitoring of the number of tenants involved in different ways to ensure
- they are representative of our customer base
- Monitoring and evaluating customer satisfaction through our annual satisfaction
- survey (STAR), we will use 2 questions in the STAR survey to performance manage
- against Tenant Involvement:
- % Satisfaction that we listen to and act on views
- % Satisfaction with the opportunity to make their views known
- Using more ‘We asked, You Said, We Did ‘case studies that have happened because
- of tenant involvement so we have positive stories to feedback to tenants.