Our Journey
Back in September 2023, we set to work in refreshing the way the Council's Housing Services engaged and empowered tenants and leaseholders to get involved in influencing and shaping its services.
A proposed draft structure for involvement was shared with tenant representatives from the Landlord Service Committee. Based on their feedback, changes were made to ensure we included opportunities for young tenants and leaseholders.
The next step was to gain a wider view of how the draft involvement framework would work and to identify the topics/services and the preferred options for participating with tenants and leaseholders. We did this by holding several sessions in the community using local community centres, Family Hubs, the Council's contact centres, Independent Living Schemes and the Birchwood Centre. Two additional public sessions were also held in Skelmersdale and Ormskirk.
During our outreach sessions, we started to recruit tenants and leaseholders that are keen to participate and support the Council to look at what is working well and what changes can be made to improve housing services.
As a result, we established a Tenant Involvement framework that has formal groups and mechanisms in place, where our tenants and leaseholders can participate at a time and in a way they prefer. We have also included the opportunity to participate through on-line surveys.
In addition, we have established drop-ins at community centres and in multi-agency centres across the Borough. Plans are in place to deliver Community Roadshows across Skelmersdale and Ormskirk to promote tenant voice and how to get involved.
To make sure we can deliver all of this thoroughly, we have appointed a dedicated Tenant Voice team focused on increasing involvement, to ensure it is diverse, that no voice is ignored and that it is representative of the people who live in our homes.
We are ensuring that involvement is embedded across all housing services to ensure that tenant and leaseholder feedback is influencing service delivery.
