Tenant engagement: Leading the way and why it matters
Radius Housing hosts experts from across Northern Ireland’s social housing sector for a round table discussion on tenant engagement and how housing associations can lead the way.
Should tenant participation in housing decision-making be mandated and would this improve services?
Cameron Watt
Tenant participation in housing decision-making is essential, but mandating it in a rigid, prescriptive way could be difficult and counterproductive. The priority should be ensuring tenants have a meaningful voice in shaping decisions that affect them and in holding landlords to account, including through governance structures. Participation should not become a mechanistic tick-box exercise requiring involvement in every decision. Tenants are often most concerned with issues affecting their own homes, developments, or sheltered schemes rather than wider strategic matters, so engagement must reflect those priorities. Stronger, clearer expectations should be established to ensure tenants can contribute meaningfully to key decision-making structures, while allowing flexibility in how landlords achieve this. The focus should remain on outcomes and ensuring tenants are genuinely heard and can influence decisions, rather than imposing blanket requirements that may not suit every context.
Loma Wilson
I would support a light-touch mandate requiring social landlords to have clear structures in place to facilitate tenant participation. The housing sector already performs well in this area, but some level of formal framework would help ensure consistency across all landlords and provide assurance that engagement is being carried out effectively. A common framework could outline expected methods of engagement, encourage sharing of best practice, and potentially include measures such as tenant satisfaction benchmarks so that performance can be compared across organisations. This could also create healthy competition and help raise standards, as seen in other parts of the UK. Any mandate should avoid being overly heavy-handed, but a proportionate approach could strengthen tenant participation, provide greater clarity, and ensure all housing associations are meeting a consistent standard while still retaining flexibility in how they engage with tenants.
Colm McDaid
Tenant participation should be rooted in meaningful engagement rather than compliance-driven obligation. Participation and empowerment are central principles because they help individuals and communities take ownership of their neighbourhoods and influence decisions affecting their homes and lives. The real value lies not in requiring landlords to simply ‘do participation’ as a formality, but in embedding it into organisational culture so that tenants’ voices genuinely shape services and improve outcomes. Housing is about people and place, and lived experience is critical in designing better services. Existing frameworks, such as the Tenant Participation Strategy 2015-2020 and its principles of mutual trust, respect, and partnership between tenants, boards, and staff, already provide a strong foundation. The opportunity now is to build on these standards, ensuring tenant engagement becomes more meaningful, influential, and embedded across all landlords, whether housing associations or the Housing Executive.
Heloise Brown
Meaningful and genuine tenant engagement is vital if participation is to improve housing services. The key question is how tenants influence priorities and help shape what landlords do in practice. Northern Ireland already benefits from a strong and closely connected social housing sector, which is a major advantage for tenants and communities, and this should not be overlooked. There are useful opportunities within the regulatory framework to strengthen tenant participation further, particularly by listening to housing associations about how current consumer standards are working and how benchmarking could be improved. The most effective benchmarking should be shaped by the sector itself. Existing forums, such as housing policy panels, adaptations forums, and consultative groups, already show how tenants can influence both landlord practice and wider public policy, especially for vulnerable or disadvantaged groups. Building on these strengths can further improve both engagement and service quality.
Jennifer Hawthorne
Tenant participation must be central to housing because landlords work in people’s homes and communities over the long-term, creating a unique and privileged relationship. Unlike other public services, housing providers remain embedded in communities, so failing to incorporate tenants’ needs, views, and lived experiences into decision-making means missing a critical opportunity to improve services. Tenant voices are essential at every level, from resolving local issues such as anti-social behaviour in individual streets, to shaping major policies like domestic abuse and youth homelessness strategies. Effective participation strengthens communities while also improving business performance, because it helps landlords understand whether services are meeting expectations. This is why tenant satisfaction and engagement should be treated as core business objectives, measured through clear KPIs and benchmarking. Meaningful tenant participation is both the right thing to do and essential to delivering effective, responsive housing services.
“Landlords must deliver quick wins where possible and clearly communicate progress, showing tenants that their views are genuinely listened to and acted upon.”
Loma Wilson
How have tenant needs and expectations changed, and what should landlords do differently?
Jennifer Hawthorne
Tenant needs and expectations have changed significantly since the Covid-19 pandemic, with satisfaction levels declining and expectations rising across housing services. Our longitudinal tenant survey shows this is shift particularly strongly among younger tenants, whose expectations differ markedly from older age groups. There is growing dissatisfaction with communication, neighbourhood quality, and responsiveness. Landlords must understand not only satisfaction scores but the reasons behind dissatisfaction. The key is to use this evidence dynamically by tracking trends, identifying emerging concerns, and acting on them visibly. Landlords need to move beyond simply collecting data and instead demonstrate clearly how tenant feedback is shaping service improvements. Understanding changing attitudes, especially among younger tenants, is essential if landlords are to remain responsive. Expectations are higher than before, and housing providers must adapt by listening more carefully, responding more effectively, and ensuring tenants see real improvements resulting from their feedback.
Loma Wilson
Tenant expectations have risen sharply, particularly around transparency, speed of communication, and responsiveness. People increasingly expect quicker replies, clearer accountability when things go wrong, and more influence over decisions affecting their homes and communities. Traditional engagement models alone are no longer enough; many tenants prefer flexible, accessible methods such as online surveys, quick polls, and digital feedback tools rather than formal panel meetings. Landlords must adapt communication methods to reflect these changing preferences while ensuring engagement remains meaningful rather than tokenistic. Co-design is becoming increasingly important, with tenants expecting to shape services directly rather than simply comment on them. For example, tenant feedback has led us to redesign our website to make it more user-friendly. Even where some service improvements take time, landlords must deliver quick wins where possible and clearly communicate progress, showing tenants that their views are genuinely listened to and acted upon.
Cameron Watt
Tenant expectations are changing most visibly in two areas: the quality of homes and the speed of service delivery. Tenants increasingly compare older housing stock with newly built or refurbished schemes and expect higher standards in the appearance and condition of their homes, including landscaping and communal areas. Limited maintenance budgets make it difficult to meet those expectations quickly, creating challenges in managing perceptions. Expectations have also risen sharply around repairs and communication. Tenants now expect housing services to mirror the convenience of other sectors, such as being able to book repairs easily online and receive prompt updates if issues arise. To meet these expectations, landlords need to invest significantly in digital self-service systems that improve responsiveness and communication. For smaller associations, this presents financial challenges, but better technology is increasingly essential if landlords are to deliver the faster, more transparent service tenants now expect.
Colm McDaid
Tenant expectations have evolved alongside wider consumer expectations and increased awareness of housing rights, particularly around safety, accountability, and service quality. Events such as Grenfell and the introduction of Awaab’s Law have heightened expectations that landlords will respond quickly to concerns and take tenant complaints seriously. At the same time, tenants increasingly expect faster communication and better digital access to services. While investment in digital systems is important, landlords must avoid a one-size-fits-all approach, as many tenants still cannot or do not wish to rely on digital channels. Services must remain inclusive, offering choice and ensuring no one is excluded. Landlords should also support digital inclusion by helping tenants gain safe online access and confidence in using digital tools. The challenge is to modernise services while maintaining accessibility, ensuring all tenants, regardless of age, ability, or digital confidence, can engage fully and receive high-quality support.
Heloise Brown
Tenant expectations now reflect both immediate service demands and longer-term relationship expectations with landlords. In the short term, tenants increasingly expect faster responses, clearer communication, and greater responsiveness, shaped by broader consumer experiences in other sectors. At the same time, social housing is built on long-term tenancies, so landlords must also focus on sustaining trusted relationships and agreeing clear mutual expectations with tenants over time. In learning the lessons from Grenfell and Awaab’s Law, it is essential that landlords treat concerns seriously and ensure complaints are not overlooked. The key lesson is not only to respond faster, but to listen better and recognise tenant concerns early and acting on them before they escalate. Landlords should strengthen systems that capture and respond to tenant voices consistently, ensuring that both urgent issues and everyday concerns are acknowledged and addressed effectively.
Should tenant satisfaction measures be reported annually by all social landlords?
Loma Wilson
Tenant satisfaction measures should be reported annually by all social landlords. Annual reporting would create a valuable opportunity for consistent benchmarking, especially if developed within a local framework where landlords operate in the same policy and service context. Comparing results with peers locally would provide more meaningful insights than comparisons with England alone, where conditions may differ. The value is not simply in producing league tables, but in understanding where organisations are performing strongly and identifying best practice that others can learn from. If one landlord is achieving particularly high satisfaction in a certain area, that should create opportunities for shared learning across the sector. Annual reporting would strengthen transparency, encourage continuous improvement, and help landlords identify weaknesses as well as successes. Used constructively, these measures would support better services for tenants while helping housing providers learn from one another in a more structured and informed way.
“The challenge is to modernise services while maintaining accessibility, ensuring all tenants, regardless of age, ability, or digital confidence, can engage fully and receive high-quality support.”
Colm McDaid
Jennifer Hawthorne
Tenant satisfaction should absolutely be reported annually because it is a core indicator of business performance as well as service quality. Housing providers exist to serve tenants, and measuring satisfaction provides essential evidence of whether services are meeting expectations. Annual reporting enables benchmarking, learning from best-performing organisations, and identifying where improvements are needed. Independent benchmarking is especially valuable because it provides objective comparisons and allows landlords to examine practices in organisations achieving stronger outcomes. Tenant satisfaction should not be treated separately from wider organisational performance because it is a fundamental part of understanding whether a landlord is operating effectively. Robust annual reporting also provides transparency and accountability, ensuring landlords cannot ignore what tenants are saying. Satisfaction data becomes even more meaningful when gathered independently, as this gives a more balanced and reliable picture than internal surveys alone. Annual reporting should therefore be seen as an essential part of responsible housing management.
Cameron Watt
Annual tenant satisfaction reporting should be a standard expectation for all social landlords because accountability to tenants must sit at the heart of housing services. Since landlords exist to serve tenants, robust and transparent reporting on tenant experience is both logical and necessary. Established models such as the English tenant satisfaction measures provide a useful basis for this, but any reporting framework must also ensure consistency in methodology. Independence is particularly important: satisfaction surveys carried out by independent researchers are likely to produce more reliable and comparable results than those conducted directly by landlords. Outcomes can vary significantly depending on who asks the questions, how surveys are conducted, and which tenant groups are responding. For example, older tenants and those in specialist housing may report higher satisfaction than other groups, which can affect interpretation. Annual reporting is valuable, but results must be carefully contextualised to avoid misleading comparisons or oversimplified league tables.
Heloise Brown
Annual tenant satisfaction reporting is clearly an area of importance from a regulatory perspective, particularly in supporting transparency, consistency, and accountability across the sector. Comparable reporting across landlords allows regulators and tenants alike to understand how services are performing and where improvements may be needed. However, the greatest value comes when this information is directly accessible to tenants themselves, for example through websites, apps, or other easy-to-use channels, rather than existing only in formal returns submitted to regulators. When tenants can readily access satisfaction information, they are better able to engage with it and understand how their landlord is performing. This strengthens trust and reinforces accountability in a more immediate and meaningful way. For annual reporting to be effective, measures must also be consistent across landlords so that the same standards are being applied and comparisons are fair, reliable, and useful both for tenants and for oversight purposes.
“Meaningful and genuine tenant engagement is vital if participation is to improve housing services.”
Heloise Brown
Colm McDaid
Tenant satisfaction measures should be reported annually because regular reporting strengthens openness, accountability, and tenant confidence in their landlords. As tenants become more informed and empowered, they increasingly expect to understand how landlords are performing and to hold them accountable where services fall short. Annual reporting gives tenants clear evidence of what their landlord is delivering and creates benchmarks against which progress can be measured. It also helps landlords identify where resources need to be targeted and supports service improvement through co-design with tenants. While there is always room for improvement, it is equally important to recognise the strong work already being done across the sector, including the positive standards set through tenant participation strategies and consumer standards. Annual reporting should therefore not only highlight areas needing attention but also showcase good practice, helping to build trust and spread successful approaches across the housing sector.
How can tenants have a stronger role in governance including board representation and tenant participation accreditation?
Heloise Brown
I think it is for individual landlords to decide. It is important for landlords to make informed decisions about how they encourage tenants to engage in and influence decisions. Tenant surveys are valuable tools to show what is on people’s minds and what trends are emerging.
Loma Wilson
We have a tenant board member, Bobby McConnell, who is now very well known in the sector. That has worked very well but it is probably not something you can mandate as it is not a role that suits everybody. Bobby started by coming through as a complainant of the service and is the textbook example of how to engage with tenants. The biggest difference I have noticed is when we are making important decisions, people are very cognisant of what Bobby will think of them. It is also key to give tenant board members the opportunity to attend as many external events as possible to build their knowledge and ensure they are learning how to use their voice. You are not always going to have a tenant that fits the role so well but you can get just as much out of your tenant executive committees and panels.
“Tenant satisfaction should not be treated separately from wider organisational performance because it is a fundamental part of understanding whether a landlord is operating effectively.”
Jennifer Hawthorne
Colm McDaid
It is crucial that each organisation’s board and executive team buys into the fact that engaging with tenants is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do. It is not a necessity to have a tenant on the board but it is a necessity that landlords have an infrastructure that enables the tenant’s voice to be heard. It is equally important that social landlords invest the necessary resources in supporting this infrastructure, for example, Supporting Communities provides independent support to the Housing Executive’s Housing Community Network (HCN). This helps build capacity, confidence, and skills. The Housing Policy Panel is a good example of this on the Department’s behalf. Tenant board members are crucial to give account of the lived experience.
Jennifer Hawthorne
We were awarded the Customer Service Excellence (CSE) accreditation due to the Housing Community Network which was described by CSE as the ‘jewel in the crown’. The network is our infrastructure facilitating tenant voices to be heard, and it is designed to hold the board and directors to account. It is critical to ensure the tenant’s voice is at the heart of holding you to account and that is how you make real change.
Cameron Watt
We can raise the bar from having tenant participation gatherings and structures to having meaningful tenant engagement structures that are an integral part of your governance process. We have tenant members on our customer services committee that look in-depth at day-to-day delivery of housing management. On tenant participation accreditation, it is important to have a robust outcome-focused approach and that there is independent quality control to provide assurance for your tenant participation activities.
Colm McDaid
Our TP Accreditation is invaluable as it provides social landlords with an independent assessment tool that gives both Boards and tenants assurance that participation is being offered to a high standard. It is vital for Northern Ireland that we have landlords that want to excel and be the best. Our counterparts in England, Scotland, and Wales have similar accreditation schemes and that is an opportunity to benchmark similar accreditation across the island of Ireland and Britain because we all use a similar framework. For too long we have admired what is going on across the water without looking at our own achievements regarding tenant engagement; particularly given the challenges that we have.
What is the single most effective method to engage hard-to-reach groups?
Colm McDaid
Hard-to-reach groups can also be categorised as ‘easy-to-ignore’. It is important to identify who we are talking about when we reference that: Rural communities, young people, the elderly, those with disabilities, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, people from the Travelling community, refugees. These are the groups we need to create opportunity and structures to ensure their voices are heard. From a landlord’s perspective, it is important to know who your tenants are.
Heloise Brown
This is an area where staff in the Housing Executive and housing associations have huge experience and perform really well. It is an area that other jurisdictions could learn from. The skills and experience of housing professionals in this area could be shared as best practice with other jurisdictions, and we could show how much has been achieved here.
Jennifer Hawthorne
The cohesion side is a huge passion of mine. You need to know where your gaps are. You need to know when there is a voice that is not being heard. Social housing remains highly segregated. Community development and involvement for landlords is so instrumental for developing greater cohesion amongst hard-to-reach groups. It breaks down barriers and creates better understanding between groups. It ensures all the voices in your network are represented. It is vital that you take action to identify gaps and address them.
Cameron Watt
Each group has different needs. Continued engagement and investment in digital are vital. People should be able to expect to continue to have their voice heard and see how that has been influencing decision-making. Face-to-face engagement is crucial. We have a head start: a lot of our tenants like coming out for a coffee morning and giving their views. For many marginalised groups, they want face-to-face engagement. Sometimes that needs to be one-to-one or in very small groups because not everybody feels comfortable expressing themselves in a large group setting. It is imperative that you engage with those community anchor organisations and that we, as social landlords, are seen as a community enabler. The work that has been enabled through Housing for All is immense. We are building a scheme in Quarry Heights in Newtownards. We have been able to piggyback on a lot of the Housing for All work done by Ark Housing in the neighbouring development. That has enabled them to be an embedded part of the Newtownards civil society. The reputation of housing associations has significantly improved in the last 10 to 15 years because of things like Housing for All and the work associations are doing generally. I think we are now seen as long-term investors and partners in supporting a wide range of social changes in the communities we serve.
“Better technology is increasingly essential if landlords are to deliver the faster, more transparent service tenants now expect.”
Cameron Watt
Loma Wilson
I think the most effective way to engage is to meet people where they are. That is why community involvement work has such positive outcomes. For housing associations, scale can be a challenge, particularly in rural areas. The Housing Executive is a fantastic organisation, and it is embedded in every community. Recently we have decided to join structures that the Housing Executive facilitate, such as the Rural Community Network. We are also partnering with the Northern Ireland Youth Forum on a pilot in north Belfast to engage with young people. There could be the opportunity for housing associations to engage more with the housing Executive’s structures which are strongly embedded in communities.
Colm McDaid
Tenant engagement is not just the right thing to do; it is the valuable thing to do. We, through the Housing Executive, carried out an independent study in Newtownards in 2025 in relation to social return on investment. It showed that, for every £1 that was invested there was £11 generated in social value. Most of the value was a direct benefit for the community such as building relations, improving people’s sense of safety, and increasing people’s community pride.
