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Section 3 Issues and concerns in research and consultation

Involving service users in research – Dundee City Council

Dundee City Council and tenants worked together to improve the Council’s repairs service. The council manages approximately 17,000 properties. There are over 25 tenants and residents groups and the council funds the Dundee Federation of Tenants Associations (DFTA).

In 2001, both tenants and housing officers were concerned that the Council’s repairs service was performing poorly. Following discussions with DFTA the Council agreed to review the service and that DFTA would be active participants in the review.

DFTA was represented on a working group established to oversee the review and on sub-groups established to examine specific parts of the repairs service. The council provided funds for DFTA to enable them to communicate and get feedback from members and to appoint independent advisors, Tenants Information Service (TIS), who attended group and sub-group meetings to support DFTA representatives.

To find out the views of tenants so that they could be accurately reflected by DFTA representatives, DFTA held three focus groups with tenants who had recently experienced the repairs service and a conference for member organisations and individual tenant members. Tenants were asked to provide their views of services and how they might be improved and to develop assessment criteria for proposals for the repair service.

DFTA were also represented on the Repairs Development Team, a sub-group of the main group with the task of choosing the most appropriate contractual approach for the repairs service. To gather tenants’ views, DFTA representatives consulted with TIS, DFTA’s executive committee and, on contentious points, with all DFTA’s members through a general meeting. A ‘partnership approach’ was chosen and a partnership board was established on which DFTA is represented.

Following the development of proposals for the new repairs service, the council and DFTA held a conference, for all tenants, to explain the proposals; to gather attending tenants’ views on the proposals and for TIS to present an assessment of the proposals and whether they had satisfied the tenants’ criteria. The council also advertised the proposals through the local press and agreed with DFTA that TIS written assessment of the proposals should be distributed to registered tenants organisations and tenants’ views should be sought.

The proposals were put into place in 2004. The Council thinks that the repairs service has improved and recent telephone and paper based surveys seem to confirm that tenants also believe the service has improved. Further developments are underway and the Council intends to continue working in consultation with tenants and DFTA.

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