Background information about Tenant Scrutiny

Tenants are represented at Board level and each of our  four local authority areas has its own Area Board comprised of tenants and elected members who meet quarterly to review performance, service delivery arrangements, complaints and budget management.  These groups offer a platform through which tenants can challenge and scrutinise, on a regular basis, our performance.  

Early in their development the membership of our Area Boards recognised the need to be able to conduct in depth reviews of particular areas of service delivery based on customer satisfaction and complaints management.  They requested,  and EKH supported,  their right to commission a programme of independent scrutiny reviews and reports. 

In the autumn of 2011, in recognition of this commitment, EKH  commissioned professional training for our  tenant representatives  delivered by the Chartered Institute of Housing.  This was followed swiftly by further and   wider cross district training and a workshop for the collective membership of the four Area Boards.  The workshop provided an excellent opportunity to work with our 80 tenants reps from across East Kent to develop terms of reference and a structure for our scrutiny groups.  Our tenants also used this as an opportunity to discuss, select and mandate the year one scrutiny subject matter.

Following the training, tenants and leaseholders worked with our Tenant Partcipation team to develop a tenant scrutiny toolkit.  This package was put together in recognition of the need to provide support and guidance to tenants and leaseholders especially those who had not been involved with our service before.  The toolkit provides:

• clear terms of reference
• a code of conduct
• confidentiality agreement
• templates for the advertisement and recruitment of tenant and leaseholders to the process and reports
• guidance and FAQs for those considering participating in the process
• and a full guide for both tenants, officers and tenant participation officers providing support to the group. 

Recruitment to our cross district scrutiny groups offered an opportunity to   involve a wider group of tenants in this important co-regulatory  activity and we advertised widely through our  website, newsletters, tenants’ groups and databases (this is a demographically  representative database  of tenants and leaseholders who respond to surveys and provide feedback).  There was a good response to this and newly engaged tenants participated in each of the three panels.

Each of the three scrutiny panels had 12 tenant members and was supported by two officers from EKH and a tenant participation officer.  They effectively reviewed the way EKH deliver our:

• Estate environmental improvement programme
• Estate inspection and estate grading regime
• The consultation and negotiation we conduct with leaseholders to deliver block improvements.

Our scrutiny programme launched in April 2012 and in the first year our tenants and leaseholders have met and worked together not only to review the service we deliver in each of the three areas but have taken into account the feedback they have had from our tenant inspectors and customer satisfaction data to review current arrangements and come up with a full programme of service improvements.

Our tenant-led scrutiny groups enthusiastically reviewed their subject area and  created an action plan for service improvement, including ideas for  ongoing tenant-led monitoring of performance and quality of service delivery.

Each group provided an in depth report of their findings and recommendations and presented this to a workshop in March this year comprised of tenant representatives from across East Kent.  Full and detailed recommendations for improvement were presented at this workshop and agreed for adoption by Area Board members.   Feedback and impact assessment outcomes from this activity has been excellent with a number of tenants eager to present their reports and finding to the EKH Board . 

Our year two scrutiny programme is about to start and once again we have hoped to engage tenants that have not previously worked with us in this and develop further our scrutiny toolkit and in house training and development opportunities.   The scrutiny toolkit has been a valuable aid to the process and suggestions for change and improvement collected from our pilot groups have been built into the documentation.

We recognise that some of our tenants and leaseholders do not traditionally get involved in this kind of activity and our ambition for year two scrutiny reviews is to  make a particular effort to make contact with people from these communities and listen to their views about our service and how we might facilitate and encourage their involvement.