‘It feels like a new start’: Jenny Osbourne on returning to Tpas after illness and why 2026 is a crunch time for tenant engagement

“It was a huge shock,” she says of her Stage 3 cancer diagnosis. “I was naively thinking I would be off for a few weeks and then be back.”

Instead, she was embarking on a course of chemotherapy and radiotherapy that would knock her for six and see her step back from her full-time role at Tpas for over a year.

“Chemo took a long time,” she says. “I had various reactions to it, which took longer than it should have done, really. It was hard.”

It tells you something about Ms Osbourne, that immediately after making this statement, she starts to reflect on how different people in different systems stepped in to help at this point. For someone who has based her whole career on a belief in community, support and working in partnership, those concepts were suddenly more important than ever before.

“It was the NHS at its very best,” she says, as we chat on Teams.

“The [housing] sector was brilliant. It made me so grateful for the sector I work in.”

Referring to the “love and support” she received, she adds: “It comes home to roost a bit when you have a serious illness. My team were brilliant.”

“What would I have done if I worked for myself?” she wonders at one point. But faced with her sudden absence, the team “stepped up”.

“Tpas were great,” she says, namechecking its “outstanding” chair, Alison Inman, for her support. Almost immediately, it became clear that Ms Osbourne’s initial hopes about the next steps would be quite different from the reality.

“I said, ‘I’ll have surgery and be back in the new year and then I’ll do chemo’. It was in cycles of three weeks. That very quickly became a very stupid idea,” she adds.

Instead, she was embarking on a life that in some ways felt like it wasn’t fully hers any more.

“You get swept up in a rhythm that’s not your own,” she says. “When you are put on an NHS path, someone else is doing your life for you… and you’re just told where to go and you turn up and you’re very dutiful.”

During the treatment and recovery, Ms Osbourne then had to deal with the grief of her mum’s death in April 2025 and her father’s death in August of the same year. “It was a crap year,” she says about what life was throwing her at this stage.

There was the separation from the working life she had built and loved, too. “You don’t want to be forgotten,” she says at one stage (for the record, the very idea!).

Equally, for someone who has always taken her job incredibly seriously, she “wouldn’t want to be half in and half out and make bad decisions”.

Thankfully, after surgery and chemo, the cancer appears to be gone, Ms Osbourne says. In December, she moved back into her role full time, and 2026 feels like that “new start”.

“That is one thing I have reflected on since I came back – tenants absolutely expect to be consulted on everything now. They are so much more informed”

It is something she is embracing wholeheartedly. “There’s a lot to be said for normality,” she says today.

Of course, normality for Tpas actually means pushing for change. The first line on the ‘what we do’ section of its website is, after all, “improving tenant engagement standards across the country” and bringing tenants, landlords and contractors together through services such as advice, consultancy and training.

As things stand, the organisation supports more than 300 housing associations, councils, resident groups and contractors, covering more than 3.5 million homes.

As mentioned, 2024 was a seismic year for the sector in England, with the introduction of active consumer regulation. “I left just as everything was really, really ramping up with regulation and inspection, which was dead frustrating for me,” she says. “I was like, ‘I have been waiting so bloody long for all this’.”

As the regime beds in and new consumer gradings are published, along with the new tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs), this has been a busy period of Tpas’ consultancy.

“My sense is that people are taking this seriously now,” Ms Osbourne says. “Those that wanted to do it [tenant engagement] are not the lone voices.”

Before the Grenfell Tower fire, this wasn’t always the case. “Pre-Grenfell I remember walking the corridors at Manchester [home to the annual Housing conference] and seeing people dart away from me,” she says. “Lots of people just weren’t doing tenant engagement.”

Today, it is a “completely different” story from the days where people “didn’t want to talk to me about engagement”. There is, however, much work still to be done.

For starters, there have been more than 40 landlords given C3 or C4 grades so far. Under the consumer regime, C3 and C4 grades mean a failure to meet the regulatory standards.

Almost all the social landlords that have received C3 or C4 grades have been local authorities.

“I think there is no doubt about it, local authorities have taken a lot longer to come round to the table,” Ms Osbourne states. In the period she has been off work, “we have seen our local authority membership grow and now they are coming to us for help, and it is people that never have done before”. Tpas currently has 121 council and 11 ALMO members.

As landlords are reinspected, the change in their regulatory scores will give insight into how quickly they are embracing change, she suggests.

The new regime has also increased tenants’ expectations in terms of involvement.

“That is one thing I have reflected on since I came back – tenants absolutely expect to be consulted on everything now,” she says. “The level of expectation from tenants to be involved at a strategic, national level is so much higher. They are so much more informed. TSMs are part of that.”

In the past there might have been “warm words” about engagement from landlords, but “what we have got layered on now that we haven’t had in the past is the visibility through data through TSMs”.

There are still a number of areas that need increased focus, as highlighted in the TSMs, Ms Osbourne feels. The approach to complaint-handling is one of these. The latest official TSM data from the regulator shows that landlords’ overall satisfaction scores were dragged down by complaint-handling, which received an average overall score of just 36% (up two percentage points from the previous year).

“If we are serious about regeneration then… I think we have some work to do [on engagement]”

“This will not change overnight,” Ms Osbourne says. Part of Tpas’ approach to driving that change is its resident involvement accreditation for landlords, which assesses their resident involvement arrangements.

Landlords should be focused on adding “a lot of tenants into your [organisational] structures”, she suggests. That also means addressing any issues that make it difficult for tenants to take part.

Ms Osbourne is also keen for Tpas to play a role in scrutinising new build and regeneration. Given the government’s goal of building 1.5 million homes this parliament, she wants to make sure tenant voice and involvement is a key part of the conversation.

Inside Housing declares an interest here, as our ongoing Spotlight on Regeneration series, run in partnership with the Northern Housing Consortium and Placeshapers, is looking to shape progress in this area, too.

When it comes to regeneration, for Ms Osbourne it is all about “that thorny subject of how do you get people involved way before decisions have been made”.

“If we are serious about regeneration then… I think we have some work to do [on engagement],” she says.

With devolution moving at pace across England, it is important that we pay full attention to the interaction between new power structures, delivery of growth and regeneration ambitions in different regions, and tenant and resident engagement, as well as the influence of these processes, she explains.

According to Ms Osbourne, when it comes to regeneration, organisations should be asking themselves if they are “living their values” around tenant engagement.

“What does that look like when you want to set up a huge regeneration scheme? Do your values hold up then? I think there is a role for Tpas to help people with that, as well as hold a mirror up.”

There is much work to be done, then – and thanks to consumer inspections and TSMs, more data than ever before to shine a light on performance. For Tpas, then, in many ways it is “business as usual” this year, Ms Osbourne says.

And after the past year, the words “business as usual” must never have sounded so good.