Residents have their say at Tower Hamlets Housing Conference

The event organised by Poplar HARCA in partnership with the Tower Hamlets Housing Forum was an opportunity to hear from residents first hand what they thought of their landlords and how they would like to see them improve.
 
The three biggest issues for residents on the day were how their landlords deal with antisocial behaviour, improving the repairs and maintenance service and ensuring value for money for tenants and leaseholders, particularly around service charges.
 
Housing Associations and the ALMO want to develop Service Standards that will apply across all social landlords in Tower Hamlets and they will be working with residents to draw up minimum standards for these three areas. They want residents to be involved in monitoring whether they are keeping to these standards and also to be able to compare the performance of their own landlord against others in Tower Hamlets.
 
Councillor Marc Francis, lead member for Housing and Development and a speaker at the event, said ‘ I welcome these measures that would make social landlords in Tower Hamlets much more accountable to their residents, and I look forward to seeing how these Local Standards develop. It is right that they have asked residents what they think and I am pleased that they intend to involve them in monitoring and comparing their performance against others in the borough’.
 
The Tower Hamlets Housing Forum will be doing some further work with residents and will have the standards in place by October 2010. Each landlord will be updating their resident group separately via their local newsletters.