This a version of speech to RotherFed – Rotherham Federation of Tenants and Residents delivered on 23rd November 2010.
Firstly a big thank you for inviting me here today. I know the time and energy people put into their communities – be it housing or wider – and I want to spend some time today acknowledging that contribution. I also want to put that contribution in a wider context, primarily but not exclusively in housing and in doing so acknowledge that in tenant and resident involvement people are ahead of the rhetoric coming from Government.
In the past two years the world changed. The collapse of the financial markets has left it’s own mark on housing and communities. Certainly the housing world changed as people found it harder to access mortgages and Governments generally has less money to spend on social housing. And this isn’t restricted to Britain either. Throughout the world a number of key changes are happening:
· New build isn’t keeping pace with demand
· Access to loans is restricted limiting new buyers who would have previously bought houses
· Social Housing gets squeezed as demand grows
· The Private Rented Sector becomes more important
We’ve also seen other changes – with references to the Big Society. I’d like to make clear I don’t have a problem with the three key principles - the Right to Know, the Right to Challenge and ‘Government’ working for people not the other way round. I am less convinced that these are new though. Tenant and resident involvement in homes and communities has been growing over the past 10 years. There has been a revolution in involvement moving away from traditional structures to a series of approaches that, at their best, really do put tenants and residents at the heart of their communities.
Three points underpin this approach:
· That involvement is diverse – there is no one single route. Involvement will vary greatly but in supporting a wide range of approaches tenants have the ability to identify what works for them in terms of their interests and how they want to be involved.
· That involvement is for a reason – fundamentally improving service delivery. Moving away from this central point marginalises tenant and residents and weakens ‘Government’ working for the people.
· That scrutiny of services drives service improvement. ‘Bad’ Government seeks to hide and excuse poor services. Good Government embraces and celebrates it.
But what is the X-factor? Certainly in my experience the culture of the landlord or council is critical. Those who ‘get it’ show that in every part of the organisation – leaders, managers, staff – and those receiving the services get it too – as active and engaged users of services, having their experiences valued and shaping those services as a result. And when it works services improves, staff feel they’ve done the job they applied to do and tenants know they getting value for money.
Within housing these changes happened with the benign support of the then Regulator. The Tenant Services Authority captured both the principles and practice of these changes and set out it’s vision for co-regulation inlcuding:
· The landlord is responsible for delivery
· The landlord agrees standards and local offers with tenants
· Tenants scrutinise
Now whilst the TSA as an entity may eventually become toast these principles have been if anything further emphasised by the recent review of the TSA. In yesterdays White Paper too tenant scrutiny becomes more important than ever before. There remains work to be done and the proposals on complaints don’t sufficiently address real and sustained failure to involve, deliver or scrutinise – remember ‘bad’ government ‘seeks to hide and excuse poor services’.
And those principles need to be reflected not just in housing but government more widely – drawing upon the best in tenants and resident involvement and allowing genuine and sustained scrutiny of services – the right to challenge needs to me much more than rhetoric.
At Stafford Hospital ‘Government’ didn’t get it and hundreds of people died. This wasn’t stopped by internal or external checks and balances. Nigel Roberts was threatened with arrest under anti terrorism laws when he took photos to complaint about overcrowding. My own work on the most recent Audit Commission inspections* showed bad landlords handled complaints the most poorly. Whilst not a surprise it does emphasise the need to get complaints right and why more needs to be done where we do have ‘bad’ government to support tenants and residents.
And it’s still a problem – a recent Audit Commission report on a landlord found:
“We found the service to be fair because it has a range of weaknesses including:
■ the strategic approach is underdeveloped, affecting the delivery of agreed service standards, customer profiling and preventing robust assessment of value for money;
■ high levels of properties have overdue gas service safety certificates;
■ numbers of involved tenants are low; and
■ there is limited use of cost and outcomes benchmarking. “
Again showing low involvement is invariably linked with low services and poor accountability for those services.
So where do we go next?
As far as possible we need to build approaches that are based on local solutions – self assessment, benchmarking and support networks. But it also needs a lot more honesty about where things aren’t right and do need to improve. Today I’m making a call for a new approach in social housing. We know the importance of getting co-regulation right and the concerns about the robustness of what is put in place. We also know there are many tenants who have experience of what works and the integrity to apply that fairly across their and other landlords. I’d like to link that concern with that integrity and see the creation of Tenant Co-regulation Scrutineers, able to review and challenge a landlords approach to co-regulation. I’d also like to think that similar approaches could be used more widely – allowing residents the opportunity to gauge the effectiveness of government locally in their communities.
Of course this emphasises even further the critical role of those involved in communities and housing – taking your experiences and common sense and allying that to improving services and communities for the future.
*please click on my profile and see this report titled Complaints and Regulation
