Resident involvement
To make it as easy as possible for residents in Lambeth Council housing to influence decisions that affect the housing service that they receive, both together and as individuals. It endevours to ensure that these services meet their needs and priorities.
Key objectives
- To promote, develop and sustain a vibrant and viable group of residents' organisations that are effective and representative, with a greater quantity of coverage that encompasses 'hard-to-reach' communities.
- To make the structure for involvement more representative by encouraging a greater diversity of resident involvement in housing management that enables choice, quality and equality, including for young people and people with special needs.
- To devolve decision-making to a grass-roots level through the development of consultation mechanisms that provide a strong voice for residents to contribute to the development of the department's policy framework, thereby continually improving our customer driven service to deliver better homes through effective consultation.
The resident participation officers' work is divided on a geographical basis. We focus on support to and growth of local residents' associations as well as servicing the many consultation groups.
This team is comprised of two officers. Each officer has a patch of TMOs for which they are responsible for providing support.
There are 11 TMOs in Lambeth providing the housing management service to nearly one-fifth of our properties. Lambeth has more stock under tenant management than anywhere else in the country, with the exception of the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea which is a whole stock TMO/ALMO.
United Residents Housing, involving four of Lambeth’s TMOs went live on 27 November 2006.
The Tenants Council's responsibility is to represent the views of Lambeth Council's tenants and leaseholders. Within the council's framework of resident participation, the tenants council has an exclusive role to speak for the users of the council's landlord services at borough-wide level and has a formal position within the council's consultative processes.
The council’s Leaseholders Council has been in existence for four years and is the recognised representative voice of Lambeth's leaseholders and freeholders who pay service charges. It acts as a consultative body on issues of borough wide concern to service charge payers.
There are area forums in each of the six housing areas in the borough reflecting the management arrangements for all council properties that are not managed by tenant management organisations. They consist of two delegates from each registered residents' association in the area and ward councillors are invited as observers.
There are about 60 residents' associations in the borough, which are "registered" by the resident participation team and therefore recognised by the council as representing the council's tenants and leaseholders. To achieve registration an association must satisfy a number of formal requirements designed to ensure internal democracy and accountability to residents.
Where appropriate consultation takes place with individual customers or groups of customers. There are several consultation groups, they include the:
- Tenants' and Residents' Diversity Action Group
- Housing Finance and Monitoring Group
- Housing Maintenance, Repairs and Investment Panel
- Housing Strategy and Investment Group
- Housing Service Improvement Forum
We value the views of our customers and believe that we need to work in partnership with you if we are to provide the type of housing services you require.