Southampton tenants lend their voice to national campaign

They will join other social housing tenants from across the country to look at how social housing landlords handle complaints from residents.

The Housing Ombudsman is an independent, impartial body that works to ensure complaints are dealt with effectively and fairly. In order to ensure residents are at the heart of the service, the Ombudsman established The Residents Panel and invited tenants from across the country to apply. Four council tenants from Southampton put themselves forward and have recently been selected to sit on the Panel to play an important role in helping to develop the service over the coming years.

Local council tenants Brenda, Ann, Mnna and Will have all been appointed to sit on the Panel for the next three years. Together with other council and housing association tenants from across the country they will take part in regular meetings, virtual discussions and consultations to discuss their experiences and provide vital feedback.

One of the volunteers, Ann, says she believes it is vital that residents get involved and can make their voices heard: “We have all heard of the Ombudsman but I wanted to get involved to see how it works. Our point of view should count and we should be able to have our say so I am really looking forward to having an input and learning more.”

While Brenda says she wants to use her positive experiences of tenant involvement in Southampton to input on a national scale: "I have been a council tenant for over 10 years and am involved with a variety of tenant groups and forums where I represent my neighbours and other tenants to help get answers and resolve issues. From my experience on the Tenant Resources Panel I know that when you know who to talk to and can deal with the people at the top you can get your point across and can definitely help to bring about change. I am looking forward to lending my voice and my experiences to benefit the national Residents Panel."

Members of the Residents Panel will play an important role in developing the work of the Ombudsman, which in recent years has included launching the Complaint Handling Code. The code was developed with residents to ensure providers of social housing follow a set of guidelines on how to deal with and respond to complaints. Landlords have a legal duty to follow these guidelines and report performance as part of new housing regulations, including the Tenant Satisfaction Measures.

We will be reporting on how we performed on the Tenant Satisfaction Measures later this year – look out in future issues of Tenants’ Link for details.