Consultation Groups

The Sheltered Housing Forum is a great opportunity for tenants in sheltered housing stock to meet regularly and discuss issues that concern them.

Just some of the issues they have been actively involved with are the Sheltered Housing Project/changing roles of the Wardens, Decent Homes, role of the Activity Co-ordinators and the Capital Improvements to the Sheltered Schemes.

The Sheltered Housing Forum, which is supported by the Tenant Participation Unit but run by tenants, is open to all tenants that live in Southampton City Council Sheltered Housing and meets monthly (excluding August and December) on the last Tuesday of each month between 2.00–4.00pm at the Tenants Resource Centre, Southbrook Rise, 4-8 Millbrook Road East.

The Leaseholder Forum is a bi-annual meeting for all leaseholders in the city. This meeting gives leaseholders the opportunity to share common interests, ideas and experiences with each other. The meetings are open to all leaseholders.

The meetings are for leaseholders to get to know each other and share information, common themes and issues and to inform leaseholders of changes to service

It also gives an opportunity for leaseholders to raise citywide issues as well as inform them on what service they should expect.

The feedback we receive from the forum is an excellent way for us to improve the service we give to all leaseholders.

In 2009 we introduced a new way for tenants to be involved in helping improve services. These are called Tenant Inspectors.

The role of Tenant Inspectors is to look at a part of the service and highlight what is good and suggest recommendations for improvement. A Tenant Inspector can look more closely at the service by using different methods such as surveys, mystery shopping or interviewing tenants or staff.

They have already looked at the Voids Service and as a result came up with some really good suggestions included in the new Moving In/Out Standard.

We have recruited 11 Tenant Inspectors and after lots of training they have recently finished looking at ASB. Their final report can be found below.

One of the main ways we get information out to all 17,000 tenants and leaseholders is through our magazine Tenants' Link.

We are always looking for story ideas and information from tenants that would be good to share so if you have any ideas what could be included in future issues then please let us know or join this group.