By John Verge, Chief Executive, Golden Lane Housing

At the heart of the new consumer standards is the need to understand the diverse needs of tenants, including those with additional needs, and ensure services and information are accessible and appropriate to the diverse needs of tenants. It’s important that all social landlords are inclusive of everyone and use accessible communication.

Golden Lane Housing is a national specialist housing association for over 2,700 people with learning disabilities and autistic people. Like many in the supported housing sector we have been on a journey to develop meaningful tenant involvement and service design that meets the diverse needs of our tenants.

There are over 35,000 people with a learning disability and autistic people living in supported housing across England, with a similar number living in general needs social housing with funded support. There are thousands more living in social housing with no funded support and many providers have embarked on knowing their tenants’ needs better. It’s important that all social landlords consider and understand the needs of their tenants with learning disabilities and autism.

There are certainly lessons to be learnt from specialist providers.

Over the last five years, Golden Lane Housing has focussed on developing meaningful involvement to shape our services and drive improvement. This approach has been supported by a governance structure that emerged from tenants asking us why and how we do things and has supported us to understand how we develop our approach and our services.

We established our first national tenant involvement group in 2019 – known as More Voices, More Choices – with 12 tenants representing tenants from across the UK and chaired by a tenant. They told us training was really important and we created a programme of training, coaching and shadowing activities. Importantly, we also introduced a buddy scheme to support members to prepare for each meeting, matching tenant representatives with colleagues from across the organisation. This has been instrumental to imbedding a culture of tenant involvement for all staff.

The More Voices More Choices group led to the creation of a committee of five nominated tenants reporting directly to our board. Tenants conceived the name, Board and Tenants Working Together, and it’s co-chaired by a tenant and a board member. The committee focus on topics that tenants said were important for them to scrutinise and improve, such as repairs, communication and complaints. Each year they attend our strategy away day, our Making Plans Day, to engage with our board and executive on how they view our services and how we can work together for positive change. This autumn tenants will be involved with the development of our next three-year corporate plan, Our Plan.

Listening to our tenants continues to change the way we involve them and develop our services. Tenant groups proposed the different ways they wanted to be involved – being more involved in staff interviews, reviewing the way we deal with repairs, supporting the content and design of the tenant annual report calendar, and being mystery shoppers. A co-production approach is important, critically listening to what tenants need and what will work at the right pace.

At an organisation level it led to the creation in 2023 of a new tenant experience team to improve communication. Tenants have supported the development of our service standards in an accessible format as well as our redesigned annual report, which now has QR codes to accessible videos. We replaced percentages, which tenants told us they didn’t understand, in our reporting with ‘X out of 10’ where we can. We use appropriate infographics to support clearer communication.

Tenants told us that they didn’t understand what functions all parts of the organisation performed, and this led to establishing Rep roles. For example, our Repairs Rep has spent time visiting the office, going out with our repairs team and importantly meeting other tenants about the service. Over the last year we’ve been working to broaden our reach to more tenants. An involvement campaign resulted in 80 more tenants wanting to be involved in different ways.

It’s been inspiring to see the involvement of tenants so far and there’s much more we want to do. There has been a real opportunity to see what’s possible. Some tenants hadn’t used a digital device or picked up a phone before their involvement. They’re now involved in online video meetings as well as face-to-face meetings. One of our tenants had not left Derry in Northern Ireland for 49 years, and previously lived in an institution, until they came to a tenants’ meeting in Manchester.

Last year there were 331 involvement activities, with 820 hours of involvement, including coaching and training for tenants.

We welcome the new consumer standards, but we were disappointed to see that the Regulator of Social Housing will not allow providers to submit their data from their Tenant Satisfaction Measures survey results that are completed in an easy-read format. It meant that we didn’t issue an easy read version this year. Our tenants told us that they didn’t understand some of the words in some of the questions, resulting in lower response rates for those questions. We’ll continue to use additional ways to get feedback. But this is one example of systemic barriers preventing real feedback and involvement across the sector that we feel needs to change. It’s important that all housing associations, including those with no supported housing, tailor their involvement and services for people with learning disabilities, autistic people or those with additional communication support needs.