For Housing Leeds, resident engagement is a core part of delivering an accountable and effective housing service.
We sat down with Simon Richardson, Housing Manager at Leeds City Council, to talk about why giving tenants and residents a meaningful voice in shaping services is so important With clear expectations around how landlords must involve residents , Leeds City Council wanted a more accessible, visible and practical way for tenants and residents to share their views, influence decisions and scrutinise plans. Through Commonplace, Housing Leeds has created a dedicated engagement space
The result is a more flexible, transparent approach to engagement, one that gives residents more choice and flexibility in how they give their views and a way to close the feedback loop.
Housing Leeds created its dedicated engagement space to make it’s engagement with residents more accessible and to offer more choice for a wider range of residents to take part in consultations and give their views.
Housing Leeds has experimented in its approaches to engagement. Traditional methods, while still valuable, could be resource-intensive and often limited in reach. Engagement activity had typically relied on hard copy communication, workshops, focus groups and more formal consultation exercises. While these methods generated useful feedback, they brought with them resource challenges and might not have always met the individual needs of residents to be able to take part.
Housing Leeds therefore saw an opportunity to build a more responsive and inclusive model, one that could support better representation, make engagement more visible and help strengthen the relationship with its residents
For the team, one of the biggest advantages of Commonplace was having a single place to engage residents on a range of topics. Rather than building each activity from scratch, the platform offered more flexibility, more customisation and faster access to results. That made engagement less resource-demanding internally, while improving the quality and usability of the feedback being gathered.
The platform also gave Housing Leeds a way to make engagement feel more continuous and visible. Features such as the news feed that gave updates on what’s changed as a result of resident feedback helped show residents that their feedback mattered and was used to influence what Housing Leeds does and how it delivers its services.
Housing Leeds found that the level of interest from residents was significant, reinforcing the sense that many tenants had been waiting for more convenient ways to contribute. The platform has helped remove barriers, and start to build an online engagement community, with many residents coming back to the platform to take part in more than one consultation. .
Housing Leeds also uses the platform to put all its information about the ways residents can give feedback and be involved in its decision making in one place. They use the platform to promote its 400 strong Tenant Voice Panel and the work of its Tenant Scrutiny Board. They also use the platform to host other useful information like its membership of the Stop Social Housing Stigma Campaign.
A benefit of the platform has been its ability to capture resident feedback that's used and acted on across its service.
One example of this is the use of ‘virtual estate walkabouts’, where residents are invited to comment on their local area, which helps Housing Leeds identify issues in specific places, share that evidence with partners such as the Police or other council services and then close the loop with residents afterwards. This has made engagement more practical and place-based.
The platform has helped Housing Leeds:
For Housing Leeds, engagement is about more than collecting feedback. It is about building trust and creating the conditions for a more constructive relationship between its services and the people it serves.
Commonplace has helped make that possible by providing a practical framework for listening, evidencing and responding. It gives residents a clearer route to influence, and it gives Housing Leeds a stronger foundation for all its engagement work
Housing Leeds has made some great progress so far, but also recognises that there is more to do.
They will continue to challenge themselves to develop practices that are as accessible as possible to a wide range of residents. And continuing to use and develop their Commonplace is a key part of this.