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Section 4 Techniques and Tools

A Residents Satisfaction Survey - Queens Cross Housing Association

Queens Cross Housing Association (QXHA) is a long-established community based housing association in Glasgow. It was first registered as an association in 1976 and initially focused on tenement improvements for tenants and owners. Since then it has widened its focus into new- build housing, housing and support for particular needs, low- cost home ownership and community regeneration. Queens Cross has also taken on the transfer of homes from Scottish Homes and from Glasgow City Council and now has around 2000 homes for rent and provides a factoring service to 1100 owners. Queens Cross was inspected in October 2003.

QXHA uses a suite of different surveys for different purposes, including a suite of surveys for monitoring purposes. This is a good way of targeting different populations and helps to ensure that survey content is focused on specific issues as well as providing general feedback about satisfaction on a wider range of issues.

Queens Cross last undertook a Residents Satisfaction Survey in spring 2003. It had been several years since the last survey and they were aware that a Communities Scotland inspection visit was due. The association was keen to undertake a ‘health check’ and to obtain evidence of performance to inform the on-going stock transfer in Glasgow. It was also necessary to seek tenants’ views in response to the 2001 Housing (Scotland) Act.

The survey was conducted by external consultants. Over 1200 interviews were conducted door-to-door. The sample was selected in proportion to the distribution of properties across different administrative areas. The survey sought views on services provided by QXHA including caretaking, sheltered housing, supported tenancies, repairs and stair cleaning and was designed to provide a benchmark against which to assess improvements to current services. It also asked about incomes, rents, future options and views on wider action activity.

The design of the survey paid particular attention to getting the terminology right so that the questions asked and language used matched the local ‘Queens Cross’ culture and housing office structures.

This survey was followed up by three focus groups with tenants in different areas where issues of concern in each neighbourhood were able to be discussed in more detail; this helped to highlight different priorities for action at a more local level. Recruitment to focus groups was undertaken by the external consultant and a good attendance was achieved by payment of a £15 incentive.

A summary of the research findings was distributed to all residents and other agencies. It was hoped to have a number of internal working groups of residents and staff to address specific neighbourhood issues, but there was insufficient interest. The association raised the findings with external agencies such as the Council and the Police and also increased the target for emergency repair response times, partly in response to the survey findings.

Survey exercises of this type are costly and service providers may not be able to act on the information collected to achieve the outcomes that tenants and residents wish to see. The advice is to keep it short, simple and useful. Advice is available on commissioning of external contractors to undertake this work and quality assurance issues.

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