By Kate Davies, Advisor, NED, Ex-CEO, blogger, speaker, influencer, marketing and communications.
During my career in social housing I worked with some incredible tenant board members such as Shaun Lansfield, Ben Middleton, Mary Burke, Alistair Moss, Annabelle Louvros, Imani Douglas Walker, Stephen Bitti, Linde Carr and Arike Oke. I had so much respect for each of them – all of whom became friends. They vigorously participated in board meetings on equal terms and were important in holding me and my team to account. By taking up roles at the most senior level of the organisation they had authority in the organisation and a unique insight into the potential, challenges and strategy making. I owe them a great debt of gratitude. At NHG we had tenants and leaseholders on all our committees and a wide range of forums, scrutiny panels, standing committees and task and finish groups, as well as support for resident associations, estate based groups and ED&I groups.
All of the these organisations have their place and as I say they all produced useful feedback, challenge, insight and proposals for change.
However there was something more basic that I yearned for and tried to introduce through a closer relationship with home-holders. I introduced an approach (known as Altogether Better) of visiting each tenant at home and asking them what they thought of their home and what we could do to make it work better for them. I had basically got this idea from a small (100 home) HA called Bexley Churches, where the Director knew every tenant by name.
Our housing officers were then asked to do what they could, within existing budgets to deliver what the home-holder wanted. Small patches (120 homes each initially) allowed the staff to see for themselves what needed doing and we delegated the budget to them to sort things out. It worked, to some extent. Satisfaction soared, and the housing officers started to enjoy their work. Over time we diluted the plan and patches grew as resources were cut so this radical approach withered away.
Nevertheless, I still think the idea has huge potential. What an individual home-holder wants varies considerably, and some of their requests are very modest. Some on the other hand probably require a move which our housing officers were very successful in achieving. Some tenants just wanted a job, or someone to help with the garden, or help with understanding their bills, And our housing staff were able to do all of this, leading to a great sense of achievement for them and an experience of being listened to for the tenant.
Today I am still interested in getting to the authentic voice of each individual tenant. I want to share what we know about their home and our plans for its improvement. I would like the “tenant voice” to be the most important driver of our work on the home. Altogether Better was possibly too radical, too hard and too expensive. Working with others, I am hoping that the Open Data Exchange might be a way to get this insight directly from the home-holder to the landlord.
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We also intend to curate and maintain a page of the most useful resources for data practitioners in the sector.
If this is successful, we may establish a subscription-based channel for buying and selling resources and services.