We are running a series of workshops giving you a chance to tell us what you really think of our services and tell us how we might improve.
The first meeting was held on 19 September, offering around 30 residents a chance to have their say on the government's Green Paper, a consultation document covering a range of subjects and questions to Housing Associations such as performance reporting, resident involvement and the stigma faced by housing association residents.
Residents' views will form a vital part of West Kent's response to the government, ensuring our residents and their views are represented.
Our Your Home, Your Responsibility agreement was discussed, with tenants providing their views about our service standards, operatives and contractors.
We asked for experiences when making complaints to West Kent, including what they thought about current timescales and how easy they find it to make a complaint.
Following the tragedy at Grenfell, we asked what information residents would like to know about their homes and schemes. The responses asked for health and safety information to be provided to residents, giving them a deeper understanding of vital checks like fire inspections.
The responses from the workshops will be fed back to teams within West Kent to improve our service in the future.
The Green Paper: A 'new deal' for social housing can be found on the .gov website.
We’ve got loads of ways that you can help us to improve the services that we provide you. Please sign up, we need your input.
Because of the new rules about how we use your personal data we can’t simply send you all a letter or an email to see if you want to take part so please simply sign up at www.westkent.org/getinvolved
And we’ll make sure that we notify you when we are organising something.
We always pay your transport costs and we’ll provide a taxi if you are unable to use public transport. Refreshments are provided and depending on the time commitment we expect from you we will offer shopping vouchers in exchange for your time, or enter you into a draw to win some.
Here’s what opportunities we have over the next few months:
Resident Workshops
A chance to really influence some of the services we provide by giving us your views on a specific area of our services. Workshops normally last about three hours and a sandwich meal is provided.
Scrutiny/Task and Finish groups
These groups are where the real change is going to happen. We need a group of residents to work with us to have a really good look at how we deliver some of our services. This will take at least a whole day, maybe longer, and we’ll train you beforehand. We will focus on one area at a time, you will help us to choose what we scrutinise.
Neighbourhood News Editorial panel
We need a group of residents that will help us to decide the content of Neighbourhood News and our Residents’ Annual report. We don’t need you to write anything so we’re just looking for people who will tell us what our residents want to know about. This doesn’t have to take place during the day so could be a chance for people that work to influence these important publications.
Focus groups
We want to hold lots of focus groups next year, this is a great way to really understand how you feel about things. Please register your interest in being involved and we can then write to you when we are looking for people – these are held at different times and places and we will let you know the subjects we will be discussing beforehand to help you decide if you have a view.
Online panel
We often need to do online questionnaires – please let us know if you’d be happy to take part in these.
Christmas New Year Panto events
Free tickets!
OK, you all know the saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch so yes, the tickets are free but we do need something from you in return.
We’ve got our hands on a number of tickets for the Pantos at:
- The Stag, Sevenoaks
- Christ Church Community Hall, Ashford
To get your hands on them all we are asking is for you to complete an online questionnaire that should take no more than ten minutes. We are asking about how we can engage with you, how best we can get your views on how our services can be improved and the time you have to spare to help us. That’s all, you won’t be expected to commit to anything at this stage but we do hope that you will agree to use keeping your details on file so that we can invite you to consultation events in the future.
If we are inundated with responses we will draw your names out of a hat as we have a limited amount of tickets available.
If you would like to be involved, please email getinvolved@wkha.org.uk or check our Events page for regular updates.