People first - Delivering change through involvement
Involving residents improves the effectiveness with which housing services are delivered, brings benefits of new skills and increased confidence to residents. It is a core component of helping to ensure that neighbourhoods and communities are places where people want to live, now and in the future. Our new involvement policy - People first: Delivering change through involvement (May 2007) makes it clear that involvement is critical to housing associations' success as effective businesses meeting the needs of the people who live in and around their homes.
The policy sets out the Housing Corporation's expectations on involvement for housing associations and includes:
- the business imperative for involvement;
- the Corporation's objectives, policy and requirements within the Regulatory Code and Guidance;
- the Basic Building Blocks for effective involvement;
- a new requirement for all housing associations to have at least one resident board member on each board or committee with service delivery remit; and
- a menu of additional approaches to involvement, including the widening of housing associations involvement activities to include communities.
The policy replaces the 'Involvement Policy for the Housing Association Sector' which came into effect in April 2004. The updated policy - following the Elton Report and the report of the National Housing Federation's Tenant Involvement Commission - builds on the commitment in the sector to ensuring that residents are properly involved and the good practice already underpinning that work.
A key component of the new policy (and our previous policy issued in 2004) is the requirement that associations work with residents to develop and produce Involvement Statements and measure the impact of their involvement activities. Because, some associations in the consultation said that they were unclear about how to design and undertake Impact Assessments, we have undertaken to provide guidance on best practice on assessing impact to help associations to develop their approach.
Residents Panel
In recognition of the importance of feedback and consultations from end users, the Housing Corporation established a Residents Panel in 2005. The panel brings together a cross-section of over 3,000 housing association, local authority and Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMOs) residents from across the country who can be consulted, polled and interviewed, providing a broad based and representative sample of residents’ views across the fullest range of issues. Full details of the Panel are available.
Tenant Empowerment Programme
Operational responsibility for the delivery of the Tenant Empowerment Programme transferred to the Corporation in April 2006 with policy responsibility remaining with the Department for Communities and Local Government. The TEP (previously known as section 16) was established to support the Government’s housing aims of increasing the effectiveness of housing management and improving the quality of life of residents living in Local Authority housing. The TEP enables local authority tenants to access independent advice, training and information directly. This helps them to challenge, influence or control how housing services are delivered to their communities.
