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A lesson in tenant engagement

Byker Community Trust has struck up a partnership with the Newcastle University to study and improve tenant engagement. With the forthcoming social housing green paper likely to criticise social landlords’ efforts in this area, Martin Hilditch finds out what they could learn from the project.

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Since the Grenfell Tower fire there has been much talk among social landlords about how to better listen to residents’ concerns and involve them more meaningfully in service delivery.

The government has indicated it feels there is room for improvement, following a national conversation it held with tenants after the tragedy. Thus far, it has remained tight lipped about potential solutions, and is yet to publish the much delayed social housing green paper that is expected to spring out of these discussions.

While the government pontificates (or while MPs take a holiday, depending on how you look at it), one social landlord in the north east of England is already moving ahead with its own plans to improve the way residents can influence the services they receive.

Byker Community Trust, the 1,800-home housing association which owns and manages the iconic Grade II listed Byker estate in Newcastle, is looking to turn the art of tenant engagement into a science. It has embarked on a two-year research programme into the issue with Newcastle University and has secured £129,000 as part of a knowledge transfer partnership (KTP). For the uninitiated, KTP’s are three-way partnerships between businesses, universities and graduates (although, for connoisseurs of government jargon, the graduates are referred to officially as associates or “conduits for change”). The idea is that businesses get help to innovate and improve the way they operate, universities are able to apply their knowledge and expertise to real-world problems, and the graduates gain experience of managing projects and possibly an ongoing job with the company at the end of the project [see box: Knowledge transfer partnerships]

Jill Haley, chief executive of the Byker Community Trust, thinks the “ground-breaking research” it is looking to carry out thanks to the KTP could “benefit the housing sector” for years to come. On a scorchingly-hot day, Inside Housing visited the Byker estate, a stone’s throw from the north bank of the River Tyne, to find out just what the trust is hoping to achieve and what theories it is hoping to test.

As it happens, it looks like the trust is already doing pretty well when it comes to the way it works with tenants and residents. We walk round the estate with the trust’s community engagement officer Emma Leggott, and she is enthusiastically greeted on a number of occasions by children, playing in various parks and gardens, who obviously know her well. Eamon Holdsworth, chair of the local residents association, whose house looks out on a meticulously maintained bowling green, says Ms Leggott is easy to get hold of, and if there are any problems to be raised “you can always contact someone [at the trust] and you always get a result”. When we stumble across a man who appears to have collapsed on a path outside a local church, Ms Leggott calls an ambulance while gently guiding a young girl playing nearby away from the area so she doesn’t become distressed.

These are all examples of what Ms Haley calls “the Byker approach”. This was developed with tenants and puts their empowerment at its heart, Ms Haley states. Every tenant has a named housing officer and is guaranteed an annual customer care visit – so each person’s views on how to improve neighbourhoods, services and performance is listened to. “It’s about humans, it’s about face-to-face contact,” Ms Haley states. The central aim is for BCT’s customers to “have a confidence that they will be heard and their involvement will make a difference”, she adds. All of which may help explain why Byker won neighbourhood of the year at the Academy of Urbanism’s annual awards earlier this year. Ms Haley says she thinks that tenant involvement and a “bottom-up approach” to housing management “stabilises estates”. “It gets people to take responsibility for their home, their street, their neighbourhood and environment,” she adds.

If everything is looking rosy, though, what is BCT looking to achieve with the knowledge transfer partnership?

Step forward Lisa van Heereveld, the graduate picked to lead the partnership.

Ms van Heereveld says that the partnership work is all about looking at how customer engagement could be improved – and the knock on effect this will have on their lives and also BCT’s wider performance.

“In particular it is about getting tenants more involved and having a better say about the way services are run on the estate and delivered to them,” she states.

“Where the bottom line fits in is the idea that when tenants are more involved and [we] improve satisfaction and the way they feel about the estate it will reduce the voids you have, the arrears.”

That means looking at different ways in which tenants and residents can contribute their own ideas and directly shape the service delivered by the association. Newcastle University will help BCT access the most up-to-date existing research about community engagement and innovative ideas from the services sector.

Ms van Heereveld’s first job is to look at all of the data BCT holds on tenant involvement and satisfaction and to talk to tenants “to find out how the Byker approach is impacting them and how we can build on it and improve it in a sustainable way”. Ideally this will result in a “framework we can share with the housing sector to improve things” more widely, she states. At its most basic the work will help the landlord understand what work it could undertake that tenants would value most – and better learn how they want to engage with it.

Ms van Heereveld also wants to understand, based on the conversations and existing data, if there are any links between the way people feel about the association, or their estate, and their willingness to engage and get involved in decision making. The working theory is that more people are likely to be active if “they are really positive about the estate” – but equally it could be negative experiences that have prompted people to try and make a difference. “I don’t know right now what the outcomes are going to be, otherwise I wouldn’t have to do the research,” she says with a smile.

Part of the research will also look at what services people want to access digitally – and potentially help people to develop technological solutions that will help tenants better access services.

This article has also bandied the term engagement about a lot. But the KTP team wants to better understand what this means to tenants and on what terms they want to engage with their landlord.

Key questions include how existing approaches can be tweaked, altered or even abandoned in order to make people feel they “can easily change the way we do things”, she states. Whatever emerges as a result must be genuinely co-created with tenants, she adds.

For Ms Haley, the work is in part about refining the Byker approach to housing management, but also about providing an evidence base the proves that it works. Ultimately the hope is that there will be research that proves “this does work and has been proved to improve the bottom line [for social landlords] if you do it”, Ms Haley adds.

Of course, it could be about challenging the organisation’s approach too.

“This is why the partnership with the university is so important,” Ms Haley states. “This [the Byker approach] is our perception on the basis of the people we engage with. Is that the right way? I don’t know. So, I think testing this and having an independent professional body looking at it to see whether that is right or not is a good thing.”

While this will definitely inform BCT’s approach moving forward, Ms Haley wants the research to have a wider impact too. Ultimately she would like to have an approach, backed up by research, that could be rolled out by landlords operating in other areas that “are undergoing lots of different deprivation challenges”.

There is much work to be done – the KTP will run for two years. As I leave Ms van Heereveld is returning to an ongoing “literature review of value co-creation articles” and analysing customer involvement trends.

There is one lesson that social landlords can have for free though – make sure you genuinely listen to your tenants if you want to create a service that truly delivers for them.

“It isn’t one size fits all, it’s circumstantial,” Ms Haley concludes. “There isn’t a manual that says ‘this is the best way to do it’.”

 

Box: Knowledge transfer partnerships

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships have existed for 40 years and their prime purpose is to help businesses in the UK innovate and grow, writes Sophie Richards. There are three main members of the partnerships - the businesses who are then linked to universities or research organisations and a graduate.

The partnership brings the business new skills and the latest academic thinking, while creating a planned, specific project that aims to positively impact the business. They can last between 1 and 3 years dependent on what the project is and the needs of the business.

A KTP is partly funded by a grant from the innovation agency Innovate UK, and other government co-funders and the rest comes from the business’ own contribution. The amount funded by the government depends on the size of the business. Generally, a small to medium sized enterprise (SME) would be expected to contribute a third of the cost, while a larger enterprise could be expected to contribute up to half of the cost. According to ‘Innovate UK’ there are currently 726 Knowledge Transfer Partnerships up and running.

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