Our response to the government’s Social Housing Green Paper

This November, we submitted a consultation response to the government’s Social Housing Green Paper. This Green Paper had a strong emphasis on empowering social housing residents, and suggested:

• Tackling the stigma felt by social housing tenants 
• Doing more to make homes safe and decent
• Speeding up and improving the complaints process
• Making housing associations publish their performance figures, and comparing them in league tables

You can see our summary of the Green paper proposals here. 

As part of our response, we surveyed social housing residents and held two resident panel meetings to get their views on some of the government’s proposals, and thoughts on our transparency.

We learnt that:

• 73% felt people are looked down on to some degree because they live in social housing
• 68% said league tables would make us more accountable to them – but only if the measures are meaningful and calculated transparently
• We could improve our transparency around opportunities to be involved in shaping services, and independent advice when residents disagree with how we handle a complaint.

We will use the feedback to improve our services, the ways residents can be involved, and how transparent we are. Currently, we’re continuing staff training to embed first class customer service, and bringing in a new IT system to speed up our communication with customers. We’re also working to give customers access to more information on how we work, how we spend our money, and how we’re performing.

We also used some of residents' thoughts to shape our response to the government. You can see our overview here.