FAQs
Our commitment
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Our Priorities
Targeted and inclusive engagement
We understand that one size does not fit all and we need to provide comfortable environments for our residents to engage whatever their views and needs. We will extend our reach to encourage and support involvement from groups we have heard from less frequently, such as young people and carers, people with disabilities, our diverse communities and LGBTQ+ groups.
We will also continue to engage with representative groups in our communities who are also an important channel of resident voice, consulting these important partners in our plans and seeking their support in reaching the communities that they represent. While resident engagement, at its heart, is about improving the services we deliver, also want to use engagement to promote inclusion and celebrate our diverse borough through supporting community events.
Openness, transparency and scrutiny
We will improve our approach to communicating with you, telling you how we are performing, where we think we need to improve and how we have used your feedback and engagement to improve our services.
We will ensure that we provide good quality, accessible information in a format that you want and that are clear to understand. We will make better use of our website, newsletters, annual report, electronic notice boards, social media, and all other available channels to keep you up to date.
We will have a framework in place to ensure residents can scrutinise our performance, plans and strategies to ensure they reflect your needs and expectations – empowering residents to challenge our delivery and decisions.
We will carry out regular reviews to assess whether our Resident Engagement and Empowerment Framework arrangements have met the aims and priorities of our strategy, setting out the outcomes that have been achieved. We will seek feedback from those who participate on how our menu of engagement, to feed into our reviews. We will communicate the outcome of that review, seeking views from residents.
Ensure that tenant and resident voice directs service improvement and decision making
We want you to have a stronger and clearer role in decision-making and influencing our services, working practices and plans for improvement. We will ensure that resident voice is clearly set out in our proposals for improvement for all key decisions we make as a landlord.
We want you to be able to challenge and scrutinise our performance and service delivery and help us change for the better, so we are working together on improvement.
Be more innovative and flexible about how we engage with residents
During the Covid 19 pandemic, we started making use of online meetings with residents to ensure we could keep in touch. We will build on this by offering “hybrid” opportunities to you. We are keen to make our engagement opportunities attractive across age groups and communities and will seek feedback on how best to do that.
We will meet you in person for meetings too, in our offices and on our estates, through our day-to-day work, resident drop-ins and residents panel meetings.
We will make better use of our website and social media. We now offer online surveys and consultations, and we will continue to investigate the use of new and accessible technologies, to maximise the ways we can work with you and make it easy for you to give us your feedback.
Engagement Activities
Resident scrutiny at our Housing Scrutiny Committee – residents will sit alongside elected councillors on the committee - Islington Council - Democracy
Our Resident Service Improvement Group will scrutinise our performance, complaints and policies, to ensure they respond to and reflect resident voice (insert link for more details)
Our Resident Involvement Register – you can tell us how you want to get involve and we will let you know what activities are on offer. Click here to join the Register
Local Tenants and Resident Association and area panels – you can join or set one up and help shape your local area (insert link to more information)
We have 23 Tenant Management groups who run services on their estate – if there is one your estate, ask them about becoming a member
Street property residents can join our street properties forum
Attend an Estate Champion Team drop in (insert link to Estate Champion info)
Online surveys will ask you about services or seek your views on a consultation
Mystery shopping – you can become one of our trained team of shoppers who test out our services
Estate inspections with your caretakers
Events on your estate and in your community, these will be publicised locally
Resident focus groups are held on various topics that relate to your home and the services we offer
Community events that bring residents together in a way that promotes inclusion and togetherness
Menu of engagement
Levels of engagement
Providing an annual report to residents
Our residents’ charter sets out what you can expect of us
Our performance and results of resident surveys will tell you about how we are doing as a landlord
Our Housing Matters online newsletter lets you know about what is happening in your area
Keeping our website up to date with resident engagement opportunities and using our newsletter and electronic notice boards to promote them
Publish “you said, we did” feedback to show what action we have taken as a result of your feedback
Setting out our service standards, so you know what to expect from us and see how we are doing against our standards
Make best use of our electronic notice boards to keep you updated with useful information in your area
Publicise events on your estate or local area
Being visible on estates
Being open and honest about the services we can provide and those we cannot
Have in place engagement strategies for our tall blocks (over 7 stories or 18 meters) that ensure you have the information you need about safety in your home and block and are kept updated about any works being carried out.
Online, postal and telephone surveys
End of transactions surveys, e.g., on completion of a repair in your home or when a complaint has been dealt with
Annual survey of tenants and residents (STAR survey) (insert link to STAR info)
Gathering Tenant Satisfaction Measures – new satisfaction measures set up by the government that councils must collect from April 2023 (inset link to TSM info)
Consultations on major works on estates
Tenants and Residents Associations meetings
Estate drop-ins
Learn from resident complaints
These regular check-ins will help us understand what you think of our services and we can plan and prioritise improvements based on your feedback
Using community events as a way of seeking your views on our services
Resident focus groups – these could be one-off or a series of meetings about proposed changes to services or matters relating to your local area
Online consultations on proposed policy changes – where we might ask you to give feedback on available options
Area panels where TRAs can meet together
Time limited resident panels to look at specific issues you have raised
Mystery shopping - you can become one of our trained team of shoppers who test out our services
“Resident experts by experience” groups – these are meetings with groups of residents that have faced specific issues (e.g., anti-social behaviour or domestic abuse) to help us respond to these issues more effectively
On-going programme of Estate Drop-in – where an area or estate needs more focussed attention
Recruiting three resident representatives to the Housing Scrutiny Committee
Setting up a Resident Service Improvement Group – this will be a group of trained and incentivised residents who will help us shape our services. This group will also act as a “Complaints Panel” reviewing how we manage and respond to complaints and will also act as our Resident Building Safety Group
Using the Housing Disability Panel to ensure our services meet the needs of our disabled residents
Inviting you to take part in more complex consultations or service design work, e.g., consultations on new build developments and major works on estates, sitting on procurement panels and contributing to policy development
Four levels of engagement
(1) Communicating, listening and keeping residents informed
We know that some of you may not have much time to get involved, but it is important you can find the information you want and need and that you are aware of the changes that affect you. This information can also help you find a way of being involved that works for you. We will keep you informed by:
The list of activities above will help us keep you informed of things that are important to you.
(2) Actively gathering your feedback
We want to maximise the opportunities for you to get involved and give your feedback as easily as possible through a variety of routes, for example:
(3) Delving deeper
While we will actively seek your feedback, we recognise that there are times that we need to get more in-depth feedback or opinions from you, for example to test out ideas for changes and to drive improvement. We will do this through:
These engagement methods will help us improve our understanding of the services that are important to you and help us learn from your experiences of being a resident and help resolve issues on a particular area. This, in turn, will help us improve our services with your help and knowledge.
(4) Helping us shape the future through committed engagement
We want residents to be at the heart of everything we do and there will be opportunities for residents who want to get more actively involved, representing their view and the view of others and who want to help us shape our policies and strategies. We will do this by:
