Social landlords are experienced at delivering resident engagement and tenant voice activities. The sector deploys a swathe of effective methods, from tenant and resident associations and resident groups to doorstep conversations and mystery shopping. The sector is also increasingly using technology and innovation to gather real time feedback from residents on a range of different issues, including methods such as automated text emails sent just after a responsive repair.
Structuring your engagement with residents about repairs and maintenance services should firstly follow the Together with Tenants charter, which has been developed by the National Housing Federation to strengthen the relationship between residents and landlords. In addition, there are two specific things that landlords should do to support residents to scrutinise repairs and maintenance services. These are giving your residents the freedom to scrutinise different parts of your repairs and maintenance service, and supporting them to do so, and committing to engaging throughout the whole repairs and maintenance cycle, especially at procurement and key milestones in service design.
Together with Tenants
The starting point for enabling your residents to scrutinise your repairs and maintenance service is to adapt the Together with Tenants charter. Together with Tenants is a sector-wide initiative focused on strengthening the relationship between residents and landlords. Adoptees of the charter are expected to:
- Establish meaningful resident engagement in decision making
- Work collaboratively with residents to design mechanisms for oversight
- Support residents to hold your organisation to account
- Be open to the challenges that all of this brings.
They are also expected to adhere to the following commitments in their work with residents:
- Relationships – treating all residents with respect and empathy, and basing all interactions with them on principles of openness, honesty, and transparency
- Communication – giving residents clear, accessible, and timely information on the issues that matter to them
- Voice and influence – actively seeking and valuing the views of residents, and using this information to inform decision making
- Accountability – working in partnership to enable residents to independently scrutinise and hold their landlord to account on key issues
- Quality – fulfilling the expectation that homes are good quality, well maintained, safe and well managed
- When things go wrong – giving residents simple and accessible routes for making complaints and seeking redress, including providing advice and support with these processes.
In our research on repairs and maintenance, all these commitments have emerged as critically important. They are the backbone of how you should work in partnership with your residents.
Consequently, as you are looking to support your residents to review and scrutinise your repairs and maintenance service, the commitments outlined in the Together with Tenants charter must be the thread that undergirds all of your engagement.
Give your residents the freedom to scrutinise different parts of your repairs and maintenance service, and support them to do so
The successful design and delivery of repairs and maintenance services is complex, and dependent upon multiple factors – only some of which are within the control of social landlords. Skills shortages, market volatility, unpredictable inflation, and broader financial pressures on the sector mean that the delivery of an excellent repairs and maintenance service – however that is defined – is extremely challenging. We have encountered examples of social landlords worried that they might not be able to meet standards of excellence desired by residents, at least not in the short term, because of financial pressures or other organisational challenges.
In this context, it can feel challenging to give residents the keys to the service and allow them to examine everything they want to. However, our work with residents has shown that giving residents the freedom to scrutinise different parts of repairs and maintenance services is an essential prerequisite to meaningful engagement and participation. Good practice in this area therefore looks like allowing your resident groups the freedom to decide the scope of their review of your services, and then providing them with the tools, data, and resources they need to do so.
The role of the landlord in this partnership then becomes about fulfilling requests for KPIs, working with residents’ groups to gather information from different directorates and departments, and arranging for them to speak to the directors, operatives, residents, and staff members they want to consult with. In other words, it is facilitatory, helping your residents’ groups to undertake the activities they need to in order to meet the scope of their review. This doesn’t mean that any broader context or challenges can’t be included in their work, and we have heard many examples of landlords working in partnership with residents to sketch out the wider financial circumstances facing the sector, and of residents taking this into account in their scrutiny activities and reports.
Just as importantly, residents have told us that attempting to direct a review towards one aspect or another of a repairs and maintenance service can arouse suspicion. It can give residents reason to pause and ask themselves: why are we being asked to look over here, not over there? This means that if there are certain parts of your repairs and maintenance service you would like residents to examine, you need to make it clear that you are not doing so to try and limit their scope, but because you would like their views on how those specific parts of your service can be improved.
Ultimately, if you do not give your residents the freedom to set the scope of their own reviews, it can breed mistrust, and may cause your residents to become alienated from your scrutiny panel.
Additional resources
Commit to engaging throughout the whole repairs and maintenance cycle
Working with your residents to improve your repairs and maintenance service should be seen as processual and cyclical, not something that is undertaken once or twice throughout a contract period. You should commit to engaging with residents on service design and delivery throughout the whole repairs and maintenance cycle, paying particular attention to procurement periods and key milestones.
A critical time to engage is when you are reprocuring a repairs and maintenance contract, whether that is a central external contract for delivering most of your services, building up your internal capacity, or bringing a specialist contractor on board to deal with specific issues (e.g. damp and mould, pest infestations). Residents told us this should also include other services that undertake maintenance and upkeep works, such as grounds maintenance. Residents should be involved right at the start of this journey, and the most effective part of the process that residents can influence is the specification of the service and how different elements of tender responses should be prioritised and scored. Critically, residents will also require training to understand what procurement is and how they can be involved.
There are different approaches to doing this, which will vary across different social landlords. Some landlords we have engaged with have involved residents in setting the specification and scoring criteria, but then found their residents did not feel the need to be involved in the actual interview and scoring process itself.
Others have invited groups of residents to attend pre-specification market engagement workshops, so prospective bidders can understand their views and how they should aim to meet them when they respond to a later tender. Others have involved residents in contract negotiation meetings, noting that this gives them a clear understanding of whether the vision and values of the contractor aligns with the needs of their residents.
However you do this, establishing a process for involving your residents in the procurement and appointment of contractors is critical, and this is also true if you are redesigning your in-house repairs and maintenance services.
Residents also told us that a golden thread of engagement needs to run throughout the whole repairs and maintenance process, going through different departments so everyone knows which residents are involved and how. Residents told us that sometimes, detailed engagement and scrutiny can take place during procurement, but then cease when a contract becomes live and is passed to a different department. Residents perceived this can be because of a lack of communication between departments, which results in contract managers not knowing they have been involved in scrutinising the procurement.
Residents told us that the best way to address this is the creation of a ‘golden thread’, a set of information that specifies which residents are involved, what has been agreed with regards to their involvement at different stages, and who is ‘sponsoring’ their involvement: usually a senior director of repairs and maintenance or asset management. This information should then be provided to procurement and contract management teams, so everyone is aware that residents will be scrutinising the procurement process and delivery of the contract. Having this arrangement in place will remove the possibility that as repairs and maintenance services move from procurement to delivery, pre-agreed scrutiny activities fall through the cracks.
After a contract is in place, you should as a minimum commit to engaging with your residents at key milestones in service delivery – milestones that you can look to agree with your resident groups. This should include pivotal moments of internal service review, such as before relevant board meetings, and the drawing up of any key changes you might want to make to the service to improve its efficiency or accessibility, such as when you make updates to online repair reporting portals or change how you are prioritising different types of repairs. It should also include moments of wider structural organisational change, such as mergers/takeovers and internal departmental restructuring.
For individual residents, the most important milestone is when they have had a repair or planned maintenance carried out in their home. Residents told us that the repairs journey should be split into two parts: 1) from a repair being reported to an operative being dispatched, and 2) from when the operative is sent out to final completion of the works. Resident satisfaction with a responsive repair they have had carried out is a central part of the Tenant Satisfaction Measures. But there are other ways you can gather resident feedback on an ongoing basis.
For example, you could create ‘Estate Service Champions’ in different communities to act as a conduit for collecting feedback on an ongoing basis, or spend some time arranging to visit residents who have recently had works done to understand how they have found it. You can also give your residents a way of providing feedback on individual operatives who have carried out work inside their home. Residents have also emphasised to us that, when repairs are carried out in blocks of flats, there is a communal impact, and that there should therefore be a process at the end of each repair to enable the whole block to provide feedback.
Residents also told us that moving into a new home is a crucial opportunity for providing information and engagement about repairs and maintenance processes. Good practice relayed to us by residents included welcome folders, such as the kind often found in hotels, which should be made available in different formats and languages. Residents also told us that moving into a new home should be the moment where repairs and maintenance processes (along with wider services) are explained, and that the new resident should be given the opportunity to ask any initial questions.
Ultimately, how you engage throughout the cycle will be unique to you. But ensuring you involve residents from the very beginning and then at key milestones along the way will enable you to understand if you are delivering a better service, and what you can do to improve. The final step to this process is ensuring that you provide timely feedback to residents involved in scrutiny processes to inform them how things are changing as a result of their input. Residents told us that in some cases, scrutiny panels are engaged with only sporadically, and that no meaningful feedback is given on how their input is improving service design. Inevitably, this can lead to people leaving the scrutiny group and becoming disaffected with their landlord. Employing rapid feedback mechanisms such as ‘you said we did’ keeps scrutiny panels engaged, and helps residents to have visibility on the changes you are making as a result of their work.
Additional resources
- Developing effective tenant scrutiny: A practice guide for landlords and tenants
- Critical Friends: What tenant scrutiny brings to landlord performance
- Taroe Trust: Spotlight Report on Tenant Scrutiny
- TPAS: National Tenant Engagement Standards (3rd ed)
- TPAS: Scrutiny Services
- TPAS: Landlord Accreditation
- Read our case studies to see how social landlords support their residents to scrutinise their repairs and maintenance services
