Tenants have their say in Ashford Borough Council satisfaction survey

Ashford Borough Council is inviting the tenants of its 5,000 social housing properties to have their say on its performance and how well it meets their housing needs.

The Regulator of Social Housing has asked that all local authority landlords carry out an annual assessment of tenant satisfaction. A set of tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) have been produced to make the performance of landlords more visible to tenants and help them to hold their landlords to account.

There are 22 TSMs, some of which are measured directly by the council, such as safety checks carried out, and others which are measured by tenants voicing their views via a survey.

The short survey will ask tenants their satisfaction about subjects such as property repairs, maintaining building safety, effective complaints handling, respectful and helpful tenant engagement, and responsible neighbourhood management. This will let tenants see how well Ashford Borough Council is doing, as well as ensure that we understand what needs to be improved for our tenants.

We will launch the tenant survey on 21 August across a six-week period. The survey will be sent via an email link, in the post, or an interview will be conducted via telephone.

A company called TLF Research will carry out the survey on our behalf. They are a customer research agency specialising in customer experience and do a lot of work with the housing sector.

The council wants all tenants to feel comfortable in giving us honest answers.

Data collected will be covered by privacy and data protection laws and any tenants that take part can opt to be anonymous with their responses, or provide their details attached to feedback. The survey results will be published and shared with the Regulator for Social Housing.

Cllr Bill Barrett, Portfolio Holder for Housing and Homelessness, said: “I urge tenants to provide honest and open feedback as it is only by hearing from tenants that we can understand how they truly feel about the services we provide. We will provide details of the findings later in the year and we look forward to hearing what our tenants have to say.”