The council has a statutory duty to consult with its tenants and homeowners on housing-related issues and also claims to be committed to consulting with them above and beyond this. It engages with residents in a number of ways, the chief of these being through a formal structure of resident bodies. People involved in these structures have long considered that the council has a poor record of engagement and consultation. Following concerns raised at the Housing Scrutiny Sub-Committee, the council commenced a resident involvement review in February 2017. This review has been running for the last two years and ten months and is nearing an outcome. In the course of the review, the council spent £46,000 on external consultants and also incurred further expenses on a co-design panel under an independent chair. The council’s draft final proposals for reshaping its resident involvement structures were published in a Cabinet paper in June 2019 and the council then ran a consultation for three months. (The Cabinet paper can be read here).
The formal residents’ bodies, such as Tenant Council, Homeowner Council, Area Housing Forums and a number of Tenants and Residents Associations have been united in opposing many of the recommendations in the report and have campaigned during the review process in defence of democratic, resident-led structures and against the mooted control of resident funds and resident forums by local councillors. During the consultation, Homeowner Council submitted a detailed response to the council’s proposals (link here) and also commissioned an expert assessment from Dr. Quintin Bradley of Leeds Beckett University (link here), which was also submitted. Both submissions raise incisive challenges to the council’s proposals. They identify how the proposals may be regressive, undermining rather than enhancing resident involvement. They also put forward constructive suggestions as to how the key challenge of consulting and engaging with 55,000 council residents can be met.
The consultation period ended in October and the council is currently formulating its final plan for the council Cabinet meeting in December.
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