In a time of huge change in the housing sector, Dr Wendy Thomson CBE, former Chief Adviser to 10 Downing Street on Public Service Reform and Director of the UK Audit Commission, now Pinnacle Board Member and Professor at McGill University, discusses the real value of tenant engagement in Pinnacle's latest podcast.
In the podcast, released on 23 June, Dr Thomson explores the major changes going through in the UK's housing sector with the development of the Housing Regeneration Bill and the creation of new agencies and calls on government to ask whether these are the right approaches.
"I've always been an advocate of courageous change and, though I can recognise some good things in these changes, we need to do a lot more. Also, there are some fundamental issues that are being ducked," she said.
"If we want good, sustainable, affordable housing to remain, we need to engage and empower tenants more effectively. We know that public services are often provided by a monopoly supplier to a captive customer, in this case, tenants, and therefore they don't have a lot of reasons to innovate or to become more imaginative about how they provide services. Monopolies generally don't have a good track record of treating their customers well, the incentives just aren't there.
"Tenant empowerment would make is to give people a feeling that they are in charge of where they live, have a choice over where it is and how it's managed and if its not working that they have some remedies available to them. And not remedies that mean filling in lots of forms and waiting a long time, I feel they need remedies that are direct and immediate," she said.
To download the full, five-minute podcast, click the link below.
