Tenant chat group: discussing the Tenant Annual Review

Consultation with tenants

Tenant chat group meetings are led by the Customer Voice team and offer opportunities to review performance information. At a recent meeting, the tenant annual review 2023/24 was shared with tenants who attended. We want to make sure we are providing information that tenants find interesting and easy to understand. That is why we asked questions around layout, design, format, clarity of information, as well as what is most important and what tenants would like to see more of in the review.

Tenants share feedback

Tenants at the meeting shared that they are interested in customer promises and the new consumer standards and how we are performing in the following areas: Safe and sound homes, Neighbourhood and community, and Transparency, Influence and Accountability. They would like more tenant stories included in the Tenant Annual Review, so they can learn about examples of keeping homes safe and well-maintained.

The way articles are written was important to them too. They would like the information to be in short and clear sentences and for us to use plain language to help with this. Tenants would like a contents list at the top of the report to help understand clearly the key areas that will be in the report.

They also value clear images to help them understand the information. It is important that images are simple and clear, so they can easily see what the image represents. We will review where we could potentially include more images as tenants flagged that they would like to see more images.

Our tenant Sandra shared that the wheelbarrow graphics were confusing as she was not sure how they related to the information in the report. The wheelbarrow graphics were part of the ‘spot the wheelbarrow’ competition which ran in the newsletter. Moving forward we will exclude the spot competition graphics from the Tenant Annual Review and only include images related to the report.

Improving the Tenant Annual Review

Listening to tenant feedback like this means we can make improvements that allow for better accessibility. We can provide performance information in a more engaging way that suits needs and preferences. We have implemented the following changes:

• contents list: we have added in a contents list at the top of the report to provide an overview of the contents and which key areas they can expect. This will help with breaking the information down into more manageable and identifiable sections.
• wording: we have reviewed sentences for length and understanding, and have shortened phrases.
• audio version: we have created an audio version of the Tenant Annual Review to enable a way to listen to the report for tenants who may need this, and to improve accessibility for our tenants.

Tennant Annual Review and newsletter

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