The Social Housing Green Paper, published in response to the Grenfell tragedy, makes recommendations about the future regulation of housing associations - including the return of public league tables - ranking landlords from best to worst. Launching the Green Paper the Housing Secretary said the measures would “re-balance the relationship between tenants and landlords”.
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been giving a little thought to whether league tables really can help us build trust and promote better accountability to tenants or whether a TripAdvisor style alternative, ranked by tenants themselves, could be a better option? Last Tuesday we opened up the conversation during our lunchtime #blabchat - asking the question - ‘How can we build trust and accountability between landlords and tenants?’
We’ve used the output from the twitter chat to help us design a workshop for internal and external housing colleagues, stakeholders and residents of social housing which we are hosting at our Wolverhampton offices tomorrow. The workshop will focus on two main questions:
How might landlords and tenants openly collaborate and share ideas - genuinely engaging people in the design and evaluation of services at a housing association?
What might an alternative to league tables look like that is built on measures that matter to customers and is ranked by residents themselves?
We will be tweeting during the workshop so please keep an eye on the #blabchat hashtag between 11:30 and 13:30. We will also be opening up a video room in appear.in, so if you are unable to join us in person, but would like to join in the conversation virtually, please feel free to jump into the Bromford Lab appear.in room between 12:30 and 13:00 where Michelle and Katie will be asking - What might a TripAdvisor for housing tenants look like?
We are looking forward to welcoming customers and special guests Neil Tamplin from Cadwyn HA and Phil Murphy of Real Voices to the lab tomorrow for what we hope will be a great opportunity to explore the topic further. Following the workshop we will be blogging and also working up some testable concepts which we would like to share with you for comment in due course.
