Who wears the trousers?

Pink or teal kitchen lino? Taps - twist or lever? And how do you like your cupboard handles? Recent years have seen a move towards tenants wearing the trousers (tapered or bootleg?) when it comes to choosing the products and services procured by their landlords.

Increasingly, tenant empowerment has meant landlords involving them in their decision-making processes, from tender to contract and beyond - it’s not enough simply to rope in residents to choose colours at the end. In the year the National Tenant Voice came into being to give England’s tenants a national platform and a line was to be drawn through the Tenant Services Authority, the regulator with their interests at its heart, do tenants really feel they are being heard?

Survey findings

A new survey of 230 UK tenants by Tenants’ and Residents’ Organisations of England, the Tenant Participation Advisory Service and the Chartered Institute of Housing exhibition, reveals that the majority of participants - 42 per cent - feel they have as much to say as fellow residents when it comes to swaying procurement decisions. But just 7 per cent reckon their views are always followed when it comes to their landlords’ choices.

Furthermore, around an eighth (13 per cent) of tenants say ‘my views are never followed’. And 11 per cent say they feel they have less influence than other people.

Richard Crossley, chief executive of the National Tenant Voice, says that although these results do not surprise him, tenants must tell their landlords that they want to be involved from the very beginning of projects. ‘I would hope that tenants are going to be heard much more. Certainly it’s our job to beat that drum.’ With the government expected to announce imminently that it is scrapping the TSA, doing so will become all the more important.

The NTV is on the case, he adds: ‘One of the things that our council members have come up with already is that tenants aren’t consulted early enough in processes.’ He says cultural change is needed in the way landlords and staff relate to tenants. ‘And that will take time. It’s about thinking “we should automatically be talking to tenants” and finding mechanisms for doing that.’

From tender to contract

Graeme Foster, TSA assistant director for excellence, agrees that this is an area that landlords can’t afford to ignore. ‘We don’t set out in our regulatory framework how providers should [involve tenants] but it’s important that providers have a tenant perspective,’ he says. ‘It’s not just about bringing in tenants at the end of a process to say, “This is the decent homes programme; we’re looking to procure four or five contractors - give us your comments on these.” It’s almost too late at that point. Do they know how the programme will be designed, what the scope of the programme is?’

Some landlords reckon they are already asking these questions. Carole Donnelly, involvement manager at arm’s-length management organisation Nottingham City Homes, finds it ‘very surprising to see in the national online survey that just 7 per cent of tenants felt their views were always followed by their landlord and a higher percentage felt their views are never followed’.

NCH runs an annual satisfaction survey of its tenants. ‘Last year 67 per cent of tenants were satisfied that we took their views into account, with 20 per cent very satisfied,’ says Ms Donnelly. However, she adds: ‘We know we can do better and still want to improve this figure’.

Further findings from the online survey reveal more figures that landlords might want to improve upon. More than a third of respondents (36 per cent) are dissatified with the advice they receive from their landlord’s staff. Twelve per cent answer that it makes no difference, 8 per cent call it confusing, 7 per cent regard it as misleading and 9 per cent say they receive no advice. On the plus side, 38 per cent of respondents label the advice from staff ‘helpful’, while 26 per cent describe it as ‘very helpful’.

Mary Walker is head of service development at 18,000-home Harvest Housing. ‘What’s really important is You said, We did [an initiative which informs residents of how landlords have acted on their opinions],’ she says, because that demonstrates to tenants the impact of their decision-making processes.

Harvest recently involved tenants in a ground maintenance contract by writing to previously uninvolved tenants who had complained about the grounds, as well as using regular tenant participants to form a panel. They then took part in the tender process, interviewing contractors and finally awarding the contract. ‘If you do that, you can help them to understand the budgetary limitations and also manage expectations,’ says Ms Walker. She adds that the housing sector needs to clear jargon from its communications.

Tenants’ priorities

The survey also shows what factors tenants deem most important when making decisions or recommendations on their landlord’s procurement of products or services. Most (67 per cent) put quality of service first, followed by impact on rents (62 per cent) and then impact on household bills (59 per cent). Less than a quarter (24 per cent), the second lowest score, rank the carbon footprint as most important, and innovation is the least important factor, with just 16 per cent of tenants prioritising this.

‘I’m unsurprised that quality and cost are at the top of their list,’ says TPAS chief executive Michelle Reid. ‘If you ask a group of homeowners the same question, they would say the same. We’re in a huge global recession, people are thinking about the costs at the same time as impact on rents and household bills.’

That innovation and environmental impact score so low is more a question of priorities in a challenging economic climate than lack of interest. She adds that many landlords have yet to recognise such views. ‘There are lots of providers that are really grasping the benefits of involving their tenants and realising that it makes good business sense to involve them. But there’s still a significant number of providers that need to get on board.’

But John Bryant, policy leader at the National Housing Federation, thinks the reality might not be as bad as the survey suggests. He says that care should be taken when analysing the survey’s responses because some categories are not mutually exclusive. ‘It’s quite likely that works such as improving home insulation will both reduce emissions and cut bills, so the apparent tension [household bills scoring much higher in priority than carbon emissions] dissolves.’

However he adds, ‘It is clear that a substantial number of tenants feel that they did not receive helpful information from landlords or that their views are not adequately (or not at all) taken into account, and this underlines that the sector still has more work to do with effective engagement.’

Visit next week’s Housing 2010 Conference and Exhibition in Harrogate for a daily ‘ideas exchange’ on how to involve tenants in product selection and procurement.

See a summary of the full results of the survey

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