TPas National Involvement Week – we celebrate our new approach to tenant engagement!
This week, Tpas (formerly Tenant Participation Advisory Service) – Tenant Engagement experts – celebrates National involvement Week!
In line with this, our Scrutiny Audit Panel are meeting this week to review our latest Scrutiny Taskforce Report into Formal Complaints. They review all reports and proposals against an agreed checklist, to make sure that the report and its process has met the agreed standards – this includes the provision of relevant information, and inclusive options to get involved.
The Complaints Taskforce report will be presented to EHA’s Board in November – then work will begin to action the Taskforce recommendations by our colleagues. The report will be shared in December’s viewpoint with updates about where we’re up to!
Scrutiny Taskforces
We launched our new options for tenant scrutiny last year, which allows more tenants to scrutinise our services without the need for regular meetings and long-term commitment. We changed our ‘formal panel’ approach based on feedback from you, our tenants. This review was supported by Tpas to make sure our approach met the government and Social Housing Regulator’s expectations for tenant scrutiny.
Since introducing ‘Scrutiny Taskforces’, we’ve recruited 18 tenants, most of whom had never worked with us before… to inform each review, we’ve had feedback on services from over 137 tenants.
Three separate taskforces have reviewed three areas of service:
- Our approach to managing damp and mould in your homes
- Communication at EHA, with internal and external customers (tenants and our contractors)
- How we manage Formal Complaints
To date, our Scrutiny Taskforces have made 24 recommendations. All six recommendations from the damp and mould review are complete. We’re working on the twelve communication recommendations – three of these are complete, and the rest underway.
The next report into our Formal Complaints Process will be presented to EHA’s Board in November, and includes six recommendations.
All of these tenant-led reviews and recommendations will lead to an improvement to services for all tenants.
Tenant Opinion Panel (TOP)
We also gain feedback from our remote panel of tenants – EHA’s ‘TOP’ tenants, who have shared their email with us to be included in some of our engagement exercises – from influencing policy and service changes, setting priorities for budgets and reviewing policies.
TOP tenants are usually our ‘go-to’ for engagement work, from recruiting to Scrutiny Taskforces to policy review, so it’s the best place to be if you want to be more involved!
We now have over 200 TOP tenant members, which is around 10% of our tenant base. If you’d like to join, CLICK HERE!
Viewpoint
Sometimes we contact tenants who have recently accessed a service, we also include surveys in Viewpoint, where a service affects all tenants.
Viewpoint is the best place to find out what’s going on at EHA. From home safety information, how we spend your rent on the delivery of services, our teams and our partners. We also share information from our regulator so you know what standards we have to work to.
Since the start of the year, we’ve received over 250 responses to our consultations, meaning our tenants are shaping and co-creating our services more than ever before.
If you are interested in becoming more involved, please email [email protected] or join our Tenant Opinion Panel HERE.
EHA and Tpas
Tpas are the leading tenant engagement experts for Social Housing. They have been advocating for tenant involvement in Social Housing since 1988, and today support over 300 Housing Associations, Local Authorities, resident groups and contractors covering over 3.5 million homes, to experience the benefits of true tenant engagement. This includes Eden Housing Association!
Did you know, as tenants of EHA, you can access training and resources at TPAS for free! Just sign up HERE to have a look.
You can see their courses for 2024 HERE. Most are free, but you can apply for a place on training with fees which we can help cover, just send the details to [email protected].
