Tpas Scrutiny Conference 2024
Thursday 17th October 2024, at Loughborough University.
Senior Community Involvement Officer, Nikki Glazebrook attended the conference with two of our long-standing scrutineers Andy Prigmore and Sharon Medlin.
Highlights of the day for Nikki include:
Meeting Nic Bliss, the Campaign Manager at Stop Social Housing Stigma who is working with the Universities of Durham and Sheffield Hallam, the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) and Tpas to understand what the negative assumptions are around social housing, and what to do about it. Greatwell Homes is joining the campaign as a ‘Pioneer Traveller’ and will feed back our findings as part of a wider piece of research.
Listening to Jack Smith, the Assistant Director of Assessment and Tenant Engagement at the Regulator of Social Housing, who spoke about the new Consumer Standards rating and inspections. He said:
- A C1 rating is nothing to ‘shout from the rooftops’ about, it is the minimum expectation from the regulator, and we need to create a culture with landlords and customers that value and understand these standards
- Landlords must be able to evidence meeting the new standards – its not good enough to say that you have done it you need to show that you have done it
- Landlords should think about their tenants in everything they do, and this will bring better outcomes
- Its not just about Tenant Satisfaction Measures! Landlords are expected to collect local satisfaction feedback data and this will also be scrutinised as evidence towards meeting the standards
Andy Fry (OBE), the Chief Executive of the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny, stated landlords must build a bank of trust with tenants and trust comes at the speed of a tortoise and leaves at the speed of a horse.
Greatwell Homes customer, Sharon Medlin, was part of the panel discussion to close off the conference at the end of the day (pictured centre right below).
Sharon said ‘as always it was a fab day. Listening to how others do scrutiny and passing on how we do it. The speakers were interesting, talking about how the new regulator works. We made some new contacts who asked for our email addresses so I hope to hear from them soon’.
Customer Andy Prigmore said ‘I enjoyed the first session around artificial intelligence in scrutiny. It was very informative and the examples shown highlighted how quick and easy the software was to use, and the benefits it could have to a company as a whole. After coming back from the conference I have spoken with two members of staff around how this could help us in scrutiny, and the wider application of this type of software being used. I’m looking forward to this being discussed by the scrutiny team at our next session and potentially using it on our next scrutiny project’.
‘My second session was around the tracking of a scrutiny, and I am very proud to say that although they showed us a different method to what we are using, we are still capturing the data that they would expect us to during a scrutiny. That is a nice pat on the back to the scrutiny team including staff and resident volunteers’.
