Bolton at Home is a charitable community benefit society that works to make people’s lives better by providing quality housing, giving people opportunities to prosper, and helping customers to maximise their income. We own, manage and maintain over 18,000 properties which are predominantly based in Bolton, a working class town with the usual indicators of deprivation.

RECLAIM is a youth leadership and social change organisation. It is a small but bold charity, using their experience and platform to support and amplify the voices of working class young people. RECLAIM’s long term goal is to create a Britain where those from working class backgrounds are proud of – and not held back by – their roots. They want working class people to be represented in places where decisions are made about their lives and to be recognised for their talent, strength and diversity. RECLAIM wants to see working class young people at the heart of this, in a country that ensures that they are seen, heard and leading change.

Although Bolton at Home has made some great progress with our Customer Scrutiny Panel in the last couple of years, we were keenly aware that our panel was not representative of our tenant base. This was also something that was found in CIH’s research on the Rethinking Repairs and Maintenance Project. It found that people were less likely to be involved in customer scrutiny groups if they had experienced poorer service outcomes. It was also discovered that some social housing providers struggled to engage specifically with young people as part of their engagement work.

Kirsty Peake, a community development officer in our community engagement team, had the idea of creating a Youth Scrutiny Panel. As she had worked with RECLAIM on another project recognising the voices of working class young people, Kirsty identified that they would be well placed to co-design a model of customer scrutiny that was tailored specifically to young people.

The input from the young panel has been excellent, and, as expected, young people’s life and service experiences can differ. They offered great insight and some new ideas which led to some tangible changes for customers. However, we had to carefully design our engagement with the panel to enable them to fully participate.

We wanted our Scrutiny Panel to be representative of our culturally diverse communities. Most importantly, we wanted to provide a space for young people to voice their concerns and actively participate in addressing the challenges they, and their communities, were facing living in social housing. We designed our Youth Scrutiny Panel to empower young people to create change today, and lead the country tomorrow.

Through RECLAIM, our panel is supported by Isabella Martini, a project manager with vast youth worker experience. Isabella supports Bolton at Home with the pastoral care and wellbeing of the panel, providing a safe and supportive environment that positively impacts their participation in sessions and trips. The sessions themselves are designed to develop critical thinking, negotiation, leadership and other core skills through the RECLAIM Skills Framework. The training aspect is unique but imperative as the young people need these skills to be able to effectively scrutinise Bolton at Home’s policies and procedures.

One of the most important aspects when starting a new project is getting recruitment right, and we used different methods to reach young people. As a team, RECLAIM brought in additional members of staff for this initial stage, and we carried out recruitment over a two and a half month period to complete the team in a variety of ways.

Firstly, we networked with local schools, colleges and organisations to deliver some taster sessions for young people. This enabled them to get a feel for the project, decide whether this was something for them, and if it aligned with their needs and wants. Along with staff from Bolton at Home’s community engagement team, we also engaged young people by carrying out door to door recruitment. This had an extremely positive impact on the local community, as we not only recruited young people, but started to build trust-based relationships within the wider community.

For the final part of the recruitment, RECLAIM carried out some detached youth work in the local area of Breightmet, which enabled all young people's voices to be involved in the project.

We recruited and underwent training with 10 young people for the panel, who either held their own tenancy or lived with a parent or carer in a Bolton at Home property.

One of the first activities the group took part in was a ‘day on the road’, where they gained insights into Bolton at Home’s customer offer. They knew in advance the service areas they would be visiting, which gave them an opportunity to do research and develop their own questions.

On the day, service managers gave them an overview of their service and answered any questions. They also had lunch with our established Scrutiny Panel, which gave them an insight as to what they would be doing and give them the opportunity to get to know each other better.

The next session focused on what they wanted to scrutinise. We asked them to put the services in order of priority, and then looked at the list as a group. We discussed why some people had different priorities, what that meant, and why it was important to respect everyone’s opinion. We also explored some of the changes that they felt needed to be made to ensure the different departments were accessible to working-class young customers and their families.

Repairs came out as the top priority for everyone; there was lots of confusion and frustration around the service, so that was what they chose to scrutinise first.

The panel looked over a variety of repairs and maintenance policies from lots of different organisations and scrutinised them. They put them into categories according to what they liked, didn’t like, their look and feel, how they were written and what they would include from each policy if they were to create their own.

Paul Gorton, Bolton at Home’s head of property maintenance service, attended one of the sessions to go into more detail about the repairs service and talk the panel through the full process from reporting a repair to completion. The panel asked lots of questions and explained that they felt the current policy was not reader friendly or fit for purpose.

At this point Paul was in the process of producing an interim repairs policy and was keen to work on this with them. Over the next few months, we facilitated workshops with the panel that were developed around the information we gathered in the sessions, and used the repairs and maintenance policies of different housing organisations, for the young people to put together a comprehensive list of what they felt was important. Paul then came back to a session to get feedback and ideas from the panel. He was really impressed with what they had produced.

Paul subsequently listened to, and used, all of the suggestions to create a much more user-friendly policy, that was clear and concise. One change, for example, was that one of our Youth Scrutiny Panel members was neurodiverse and found shades of blue calming - the policy was therefore adjusted so it was blue in colour. Another change was that two of the young people wanted the policy available in a variety of languages as they translate for their parents, which is now possible.

The panel now feel that their parents can access and understand the policy and that they will feel more empowered to engage with our repairs team moving forward.

Our journey is ongoing, but if any other organisations are interested in developing their own Youth Scrutiny Panel, this is what we have learned that we feel is helpful to share.

• Before you begin, get buy in from the senior management team within your organisation. If they are not prepared to take suggestions on board or make changes, then there is little point investing the time and resources it takes to develop a Youth Scrutiny Panel - it is not a tick box exercise.
• Partner with an organisation like RECLAIM who are experienced in developing inclusive, young person led panels.
• Make the time for recruitment and be prepared for it to take a few weeks. Also add a QR code to your publicity with a contact form behind it.
• Evening and weekend work is key; sessions are set around the availability of the young people, and not ours.
• Make your taster sessions fun and inclusive so young people can get an idea of what it involves.
• Once you have your cohort, start with an informal, fun, get to know each other session to start team building.
• Make sure you invest in appropriate training. You need to equip the young people with the knowledge and skills to scrutinise policies and procedures effectively.
• Be realistic about timescales and manage your organisations expectations. We carried out one large service review and one smaller review in the first 12 months.

Hear from Bolton at Home's repairs manager on why the group were so successful in their repairs review.