By Matt Jones, Executive Director (Customers), MSV Housing Group

With a long history and proud heritage of operating in diverse areas spanning several decades, MSV has always maintained a strong focus on core purpose and our role in delivering local services in communities we serve.

Ensuring that strong EDI focus is embedded in the DNA of the organisation has always been a key business driver, which is reflected in corporate strategy, the values of the organisation and the expectations we hold for colleagues. However, with the inception of consumer standards and publication of the Better Social Housing review, along with wider operating environment challenges in the sector, we recognised the need to modernise our approach to customer voice, including ensuring that diverse voices authentically influence the organisation at all levels.

We operate across a diverse geography across the north west with homes in 17 local authority areas, ranging from large concentrations in parts of Greater Manchester (40% of our 9000 homes are in Manchester) to small numbers of outlying homes in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 30% of tenants are non-white, rising to 40% in Manchester.

32% of MSV tenants in Manchester are black with the concentration of our homes being in Moss Side, an area impacted by systemic entrenched inequality over many years. In Rochdale almost 20% of tenants are Asian, conversely in Stockport only 7% of tenants are non-white. With such diversity and difference between areas, it was essential that we brought more diversity into our customer voice structures as well as ensuring more widely that diverse voices that reflect communities are heard.

A radical review of our former customer involvement strategy has been undertaken in conjunction with customers. Using a genuine co-production approach, we have completely reset our approach launching a new involvement model that underpins the new customer voice strategy. The model sets out the links between the different tiers, types and levels of involvement whilst recognising that customer insight is the way in which the majority of customers will choose l elect to interact with us. The new strategy and model have brought more people into the fold in unprecedented numbers, with over 500 tenants now on our customer network, over 300 attending face-to-face events across all our main areas with senior leaders and over 200 attending focus groups to shape new strategies. We have found getting back to face-to-face events whilst being highly visible in areas we serve has been both powerful and has helped to rebuild trust around core services, some of which had been under pressure for many years.

We have also ensured that our customer voice strategy is not seen as the responsibility of a relatively small specialist team – rather, it is embedded across the whole business with a toolkit to support colleagues, a central team who are on hand to advise and objectives linked to individual and team objectives. Embedding customer voice and EDI are strategic priorities for the business starts at the very top of the business and having reviewed our former Customer Committee, we identified that the composition wasn’t representative of the communities we served. As well as reinvigorating our approach, this gave us an opportunity to really bring our EDI commitments to life through changes to our governance structures.

We embarked on a huge recruitment campaign supported by TPAS targeting customers and areas that we don’t traditionally hear from. Following recruitment of five new customers members, we paired each of them with three mentors from the main board who also sit as Customer Committee members. These appointments have not only brought a new perspective to our governance and assurance activity around customer facing services, they have provided a higher level of confidence that by bringing more diverse voices into our formal governance they are setting a tone for hearing more diverse voices that are reflective of the communities we serve. The new committee comprises of seven members (three board members and five customers, one of the customers is also a board member.) There are five women compared to two men, reflecting that MSV has more female customers than male. Four of the members are non-white, one is a younger person who is under 30, one is neuro diverse and one has a background in supported housing, which accounts for over 15% of MSV’s homes. Of the five new members, one is a leaseholder and there are a diverse range of geographical areas represented.

We are not saying that we have a silver bullet but after nine months of operation the new committee is working well with continued co-production conversations between members and officers to ensure that whist giving assurance around operational services, we ensure customer voices are heard and influence service delivery at every level.

We take EDI very seriously at MSV – it is not just a strategy that sits on a shelf to be wheeled out periodically with the board or exec. Focussing our EDI approach on the step change we needed to make around customer voice and influence and the continued journey we are all on with consumer regulation has given us something to hang it on. It’s not perfect but it’s a model that is serving us well with customers, welcoming the opportunity to have their voices heard in ways and at levels that suit their preferences.