Resident engagement with Housing Services 2022-2026 HTML version

We want to ensure our residents, both tenants and leaseholders have every opportunity to engage with us. Listening and acting on your feedback is key for us to improve and tailor our housing service to meet your needs.

We are proposing a new four-year resident engagement strategy that will be centred around five key aims, to enable us to deliver meaningful resident involvement where you can influence and shape our current and future services.

Before we make any changes, we want to hear what you think. In this leaflet we summarise how we are proposing to change resident engagement and give you the opportunity to provide your views.

Proposed aims

Below you will find information about the five aims and how we propose to deliver against them.

Overall aim

To ensure that you have every opportunity to engage with us in the ways that suit you. We will offer involvement that is accessible and attractive to all.

How will we achieve this?

We will develop with you a wide range of ways to get involved that ensure your views are heard and that you can influence and help shape our services.

We will work with you to develop the ways we capture and record your feedback to ensure this leads to continuous learning and improvements.

We will provide training and support to residents to help remove barriers to engagement.

You will be able to engage with and influence the key groups and individuals who govern and manage Arun District Council, including our management team and Housing and Wellbeing Committee.

Overall aim

To ensure you know how we are performing and what decisions we are making, so that you can challenge us when things are not working as they should.

How will we achieve this?

By having a resident-led process that has oversight of our compliance with the Regulators consumer standards and that can influence strategy, policy, standards and performance measures.

By working with you to understand what performance measures are important to you and being open and transparent in the provision of information about our services.

By publishing information on the complaints we have received, including the lessons learned, trends and how these complaints have been used to improve the services you receive.

Annually reviewing our performance against the Housing Ombudsman Complaint Handling Code, with our involved residents.

Overall aim

We want to maximise our use of digital technologies to engage with you and deliver an improved customer experience.

How will we achieve this?

We will use and develop our digital platforms including our website, resident portal and social media to enable effective two-way communication with you.

We will work with you to help to remove any barriers to you accessing technology, and offer support if you want to improve your digital skills, such as paying bills online, video calling, online shopping.

Overall aim

We want to improve our communication with you. Communication is critical, and it is important that we know who our residents are, how they want to be involved, informed and contacted

How will we achieve this?

We want to review and develop how we keep residents informed and ensure we make it easy for you to tell us when things are working well or not so well.

We will implement a ‘you said, we did’ approach to feedback and share this regularly on our website and in our newsletter.

We will promote how you can raise a complaint, what you can expect and what support is available to you throughout the process.

We will involve you in creating and developing of our publications to ensure they are clear, easy to understand and meet the needs of our residents/or customers.

We will regularly share the impact that resident involvement makes through our website, newsletter, social media, and Annual Report.

Overall aim

To work in partnership with our communities to make a positive contribution to the areas they live and help further their capacity to address local issues.

How will we achieve this?

We will promote and facilitate engagement in the communities we serve, making sure that there are a range of ways for people with an interest in their local community to engage with us and have their views heard.

We will get to know our communities better by regularly seeking their feedback about their neighbourhoods and local areas and use that feedback to help shape future priorities.

We aim to establish strong and sustainable links with our partners and local voluntary groups to deliver projects to the benefit of our residents and the wider community.

We understand that being listened to and having your feedback improve and shape our services is important to you. That’s why we are making the following commitments through the new resident engagement strategy.

• Ensure you have the right tools and information to effectively be involved
• The relevant service manager and resident engagement lead for each involvement activity will be accountable for acting on feedback, keeping residents informed and reporting to the Group Head of Residential Services. They will also provide regular updates on engagement outcomes to the Housing and Wellbeing Committee
• Develop our training offer for involved residents
• Develop, with residents, an induction programme for all new staff to raise the profile of resident involvement so that everyone is aware of the benefits and outcomes that it brings.
• Promote engagement and work to increase the numbers of residents who engage with us
• Ensure residents are informed of and can take part in national conversations
• We will monitor who is involved and work towards engagement which ensures we hear from a diverse range of our residents, and that these views directly impact the services we provide

It is important that this new proposed strategy works for you. The feedback you provide will inform our Resident Engagement Strategy and how we approach resident engagement for housing services from 2022-2026.

Thank you for taking the time to read about our proposed approach to resident engagement.

Your views are valuable to us, and we look forward to receiving your feedback so we can shape our resident engagement work from 2022-2026.

Closing date

All responses to be received by Monday 4 April 2022.

If you have any questions about the content of this leaflet, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01903 737656.