Agenda item

Recruitment to TSB Update

The Board discussed and agreed at their last meeting in October recruitment to the Board and the need to make this a priority piece of work for the Board during this municipal year.

 

Members are asked to note the update provided and discuss any further comments around this area of work.

Minutes:

The Chair explained that he would be changing the agenda order, so the item on recruitment update would be first, given its importance to the Board at present.

 

A draft leaflet was distributed to all members for information, its purpose being to raise awareness of the board and advertise the opportunities for new members.

 

KM noted that at the last meeting there had been a discussion around recruiting members from other involved groups of Housing Leeds. KM explained that whilst this suggestion from the board had been acknowledged, it was important that the Board recognised Housing Leeds ambition to broaden participation. KM  explained this further advising that there are currently approximately 155 tenants that are involved with Housing Leeds across various forums such as VITAL, HAP’s, High Rise Strategy Group and the Repairs & Investment Group. 49 of the 155 are involved in more than one forum and the average age of members is 63, looking further into this 48% are aged 65 or over.

 

KM gave an update on current work he is involved in to analyse the use of Annual Home Visit data and subsequent recruitment of tenants expressing a willingness to become involved. KM referred to his personal experience of using the data to try and identify new members for the High Rise Strategy Group, where he had contacted 74 tenants and recruited one new member. Noting that other officers will contact tenants independently in respect of individual forums (with some delays from receipt of interest until contact), he was inclined to suggest that Housing Leeds should be contacting tenants more quickly on receiving AHV data and making them aware of the full range of involvement opportunities (an A4 menu of involvement’ sheet was referred to) rather than ad-hoc opportunities as they arise.

 

It was also noted that the ‘menu of involvement’ has been updated and re-worded and the Tenant Scrutiny Board is now listed at the top of the menu rather than lower down to make it more prominent.

 

The Scrutiny Officer noted that at the previous meeting there was a discussion around the Board’s Terms of Reference and the provision that members of Board do not hold a position on any Housing Leeds City Wide group. The Scrutiny Officer would therefore aim to facilitate a meeting between the Governance Team, the Chair and Vice Chair of the Board and Housing Leeds to clarify any scope to amend this rule. The Chair noted that the reasoning behind this rule this has been raised by Councillors before to which a member noted this may have been to preserve independence of the Board due to the type of inquiry they may carry out. The Chair noted that he would argue that Housing Advisory Panels (HAPs) are local rather than citywide and that Councillors sit on HAPs as well as Scrutiny Boards and that if elected members can do this then why can’t tenants? A member noted that whilst HAPs are local, they and other forums feed into other citywide bodies i.e. the Cross City HAP Chairs Group which mean that the conflict of interest could occur that way. Another member spoke about whilst not objecting to HAP members joining the Board, that there is still a large risk of someone being on multiple Boards, and that this is currently occurring. A compromise suggested was that someone should be able to join the Tenant Scrutiny Board and one other group only to try and prevent someone from being on multiple forums.

 

The Board carried out a vote as to the best way to proceed on this matter giving support to the Chair taking this forward via a meeting with Housing and Governance.

 

RESOLVED – That work continues to be carried out to clarify the reasoning behind HAP members being unable to join the Tenant Scrutiny Board.

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