Housing consultation and feedback

Consultation involves asking for peoples’ views to consider them before reaching decisions.

We allow time for tenants to make decisions, landlords to consider them, and for both to agree on the outcome.

Effective consultation helps to design and deliver services people want. It’s also a good way to measure service delivery and effectiveness.

Housing Services is committed to improving service delivery and increasing customer satisfaction by making sure that we meet our customers’ needs.

We have developed a range of options to ensure participation is maximised. This is supported by an annual calendar of consultation events.

We consult on a number of topics, including some where we have a statutory duty to do so. We also carry out large scale surveys, such as our tenant satisfaction survey, to gather views on the services we provide.

To comment on North Ayrshire Council consultations, visit the Community Planning Partnership website.

To continually improve our services, we need to regularly collect and use feedback from customers, which is then utilised to improve service delivery.

It is also important that we feed back to those who have participated, so that they know that their views have been listened to and are being acted on.

We use a number of methods to provide this feedback, including:

• producing an annual consultation report
• sending information to Registered Tenants’ Organisations and the North Ayrshire Network

We know from our tenant satisfaction surveys that the ‘Tenants Chat’ newsletter is a popular way of providing feedback to tenants, residents and all service users. We will use this forum to highlight how tenant engagement has shaped or improved our service.

If you have a comment, compliment or complaint about any part of the Housing service, you can report it easily to any member of staff.

We are committed to providing high quality customer services. We value complaints and use information from them to help us improve our services.

You can access a leaflet outlining the process on how to complain, comment or compliment a service or staff member:

• at most local Council offices and customer contact centres
• online in our complaints and feedback section
• in local libraries

The forum discusses local housing challenges and contributes to the development of the Local Housing Strategy.

Topics can cover:

• regeneration
• homelessness
• special needs housing
• pressured area status
• affordable and rural housing needs

To attend, please email the Development and Strategy Team on developmentandstrategy@north-ayrshire.gov.uk.

We hold two landlord events per year, to meet and discuss challenges within the private rented sector. To attend, email the Private Sector Advice Team on psadvice@north-ayrshire.gov.uk or call 01294 324644.

A phone survey is carried out with 10% of applicants on the North Ayrshire Housing Register.

We also ask for tenants' views through comments slips, in our Customer Connections Strategy document.

The Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR) can consider issues raised about 'significant performance failures'. The SHR defines this as a landlords actions that puts the interests of their tenants at risk . This is a systematic problem that does, or could, affect all the landlord's tenants.

If a problem like this affects you, report it to us. If you have told us and we haven't resolved it, report it to the SHR.