Town & Country Housing (TCH) has always been committed to including residents in reviewing its services, from regular surveys to our complaints process, the Resident Scrutiny Panel and resident board members.

Our longstanding approach to resident engagement very much mirrors the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 which aims to ensure residents’ voices are heard by social landlords.

TCH has grown substantially over the last 18 months following the merger with Rosebery Housing and the five new Extra Care locations who joined us from Rapport Housing.

With all these changes, it’s even more important that residents can get involved and help design and review our services, in ways that work for them. That’s why we’ve created a new Resident Engagement Strategy.

Developing the strategy

Engaging with residents has been vital in creating this strategy. Close to 1,000 residents completed our online and paper survey last summer, and from that we learned that there’s a real appetite among residents to help review our services. The areas that residents told us they would most like to influence are:

• Repairs
• Planned Maintenance
• How we communicate with residents
• Rent and service charges.

We also held a resident focus group to discuss the structure and content of the strategy, based on the initial survey findings.

Through this group it became clear that residents had a desire to have a voice at a strategic level, and wanted to ensure that all voices are heard in terms of representation and diversity.

There was also a clear message that residents want to engage with us over issues that are local to where they live.

The strategy’s aims

This feedback, coupled with our existing knowledge and experience, has helped us to create our new Resident Engagement Strategy.

You, our residents, are the best judge of whether our services are working, how they can be improved to better meet your needs, and what already works well.

The strategy sets out how we can work together so TCH can always be listening and learning from you.

You can read the full strategy document here. As a taster here’s the four aims that we want to achieve for, and with, our residents:

• Enable – provide greater choice and flexibility in how and when our residents can get involved
• Embed – create and embed a framework for resident engagement across TCH
• Influence – ensure residents have a real influence over the services they receive
• Improve – ensure that resident engagement leads to continuous improvement of the services we provide.

Next steps

It’s now time to deliver on the strategy! We’ve updated our webpage to show the various ways you can get involved and we’ll be actively promoting opportunities as they arise.

We’ll also be sharing details of the impact that residents have made to TCH’s services.

We’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to get involved, you can find our current list of opportunities here, where you can sign up to get involved or to find out a bit more about each opportunity.

Alternatively, the Resident Engagement team are happy to talk to you about the ways you can get involved. You can reach them by emailing getinvolved@tch.org.uk or by calling 01892 501480.