What is the Youth Scrutiny Panel?
In 2022, we partnered with youth charity RECLAIM (www.reclaim.org.uk) to create our Youth Scrutiny Panel. Our aim is to capture the voices of our younger tenants and customers.
To do this, we actively recruit young people from our culturally diverse communities and offer them a comprehensive training program. We do this to help familiarise members with our services and to support their critical thinking, negotiation, and other essential skills.
While most housing associations, including us, have customer scrutiny panels (you can learn more about our main Customer Scrutiny Panel by tapping here), we were one of the very first to create a dedicated forum to allow customers aged 16 to 25 (who are either tenants themselves, or living with tenants) to have a say in how our services are run.
Since establishing our Youth Scrutiny Panel, members have worked closely with service leads across the organisation to play invaluable roles in developing our latest Repairs Policy (you can read a short case study on this below), creating our new 'Good Neighbour Guide' (you can read our Good Neighbour Guide by tapping here), and making recommendations for our social media and other communications channels. In each case, their unique perspectives have offered us invaluable insights into how our services and policies are perceived by younger customers.
Their work goes beyond scrutinising our services and policies, though. They've also worked on a wider project to support victims of hate crime, along with a significant campaign aimed at tackling misconceptions linked with social housing.
Our approach has received much interest from other housing providers as they seek to capture the views of younger tenants and customers. Members of the panel were even invited to hold a best practice workshop at the TPAS (Tenant Participation Advisory Service) Conference.
