Do younger housing tenants have greater expectations?

16/10/2019 @ 05:05

Powys County Council wants to know if younger people have higher expectation levels of their council house tenancy than their older counterparts.

Housing chiefs will be investigating the issue as part of a raft of measures to improve their satisfaction survey levels amongst tenants.

At a meeting of the Economy Residents, Communities and Governance scrutiny committee, on Monday the Tenant Satisfaction and Customer First Improvement Plan was discussed.

PCC says that it has already improved the way it deals with calls and service requests. It will now explore proposals for a joint call handling centre, self-serve and web-chat options.

It is also looking at the areas with the lowest satisfaction rates to understand what needs to be done to improve services for those tenants.

PCC housing strategy team leader, Terry Flynn, said: “We need to understand why new tenants report after a year a higher level of dissatisfaction than more established tenants.

“Why people under 35 report higher levels of dissatisfaction. The basic thinking we have is it’s because expectations are higher. Young people, particularly if they are moving into a new home, expect a lot.

“If for example someone has been to visit a show home and then applies for a council house. There is a world of difference but their expectation is still at the level of the show home.”

“We need to see how we can address this and it’s a question of gaining a real intelligence. We need to know what the real expectations are? Are they satisfiable? And do it.”

Committee chair, Cllr Mathew Dorrance (Labour Brecon St John), asked: “What evidence do you have for that?”

Mr Flynn said there was no evidence, but a “gut feeling” of the whole team when the question was discussed.

Cllr Dorrance added: “As a councillor with social housing, my experience has been that the expectation is for quality housing at affordable prices not the show home.”

“We need to deal with evidence when we come to scrutiny.”

PCC tenancy services manager, Andy Thompson, said: “What we have is a bald statistic saying they are not as happy as other people. And we have to ask the question why? It may or may not be true.”

Throughout the county PCC has 5,300 tenants.

In April, Cardiff based Beaufort research spoke to 713 PCC tenants in phone interviews spread across the county. It was followed in May by an in-house telephone survey of 128 tenants as part of a call-back exercise of which there were 57 responses.

The survey showed:

· 65 per-cent overall satisfaction

· 77 per-cent satisfied with quality of the home

· 84 per-cent happy with neighbourhood as a place to live

· 71 per-cent felt rent provides value for money

· 65 per-cent felt service charge provides value for money

· 54 per-cent satisfied with repairs and maintenance

· 47 per-cent fairly or very satisfied that PCC Housing Service Listens to their views and acts on them

· 78 per-cent agree that housing has friendly and approachable staff

· 62 per-cent agree the housing service has a good reputation in their area

· 72 per-cent trust the housing service

The next tenants (STAR) survey for Powys will be conducted in 2021, and should allow time for the changes to take root and have an impact on customer experience.