By Sarah Crabb
Assistant Director of Housing Services, Mount Green Housing Association

Resident engagement lies at the heart of recent legislative and regulatory changes affecting our sector. This has, quite rightly, prompted us all to re-evaluate how we listen to the resident voice and ensure it makes a difference.

At Mount Green, we spent the last year reviewing our approach and, as a result, are about to launch our new resident engagement strategy.

From the outset, we were determined to work closely with residents to co-create this crucial strategy. We were also committed to making sure it delivered meaningful, tangible results by ensuring we act on resident feedback.

Another key consideration was capacity. As a small(ish) housing association, we needed to make sure our action plan for engagement activities was achievable and within our resources – as, clearly, raising unrealistic expectations would damage the trust we’re seeking to strengthen with our residents.

We began the process by running a half-day workshop with our resident committee group (RCG) – a scrutiny group we set up to represent residents’ views and report directly to the board.

During this face-to-face focus session, we discussed key themes, what was important to them, and recent legislative and regulatory guidance.

We then involved Mount Green team members for their input, producing various drafts of the document and again consulting with the RCG before a final draft was presented to the board.

Feeding into the strategy was insight from a resident engagement advisory internal audit, which flagged up what we were doing well and where we could improve.

“As a small(ish) housing association, we needed to make sure our action plan was achievable and within our resources…raising unrealistic expectations would damage the trust we’re seeking to strengthen with our residents”

We then took stock of our resident engagement activities’ strengths and weaknesses, tying in our findings with our key corporate objectives, the Tpas Tenant Engagement Standards and the Social Housing White Paper’s recommended actions.

Also helping to shape the strategy was a survey we ran, which used some of the new Tenant Satisfaction Measures to temperature check resident perceptions. The results allowed us to identify areas of concern and where we needed to focus engagement.

Central to the new resident engagement strategy is our ‘Home to Landlord’ approach, which is one of our corporate objectives. This approach recognises the need for choice and the opportunity for people to get involved, individually or collectively, on different levels.

For example, a resident may only be interested in engaging with us on a personal level about their home, while others want to get involved in their neighbourhood through estate representation or community events. Residents can, of course, get progressively more involved, perhaps wanting to input at a more strategic, organisational ‘landlord’ level.

Within these ‘home’, ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘landlord’ levels, engagement takes place at the various different stages of implementing changes – from planning and design, through delivery, evaluation and monitoring, to scrutiny.

The idea behind structuring this multi-faceted approach is to ensure we reach as many residents as possible, so we can achieve diversity of voice.

Our evolving co-creation of the new resident engagement strategy has been a fascinating journey, as we have consulted, discussed and explored the best way forward to deliver our mission to ‘listen and act’ on what our residents tell us.

As a result, we’re introducing various initiatives, including tenancy review visits to see people in their home each year and ‘leaving conversations’ with outgoing residents about their experiences.

A new resident volunteer programme is also in the pipeline, aiming to get our estate representatives more involved and empowered, and we’ll be working with the RCG to co-create a good neighbourhood management policy over the next year.

At Mount Green, with just 1,600 homes across Surrey and North Sussex, we’re proud of what makes us different: small enough to know and understand our residents – large enough to deliver a positive impact.

But, while our modest size means we get to know many of our residents very well, we know we can always strive to do better. I’m excited that our new resident engagement strategy will help us achieve just that.