Beyond the Satisfaction Form: How Social Housing Organisations Are Reinventing Resident Voice
Key Takeaways
- The government has backed 20 live pilots across England with £2 million from the Social Housing Innovation Fund, each testing genuinely new approaches to resident engagement - not just satisfaction forms
- Ten of those pilots are profiled below in detail, spanning mobile outreach, digital safety tools, youth panels, refugee-led governance, domestic abuse survivor advisory panels, and more
- The RSH's Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard makes meaningful engagement a regulatory expectation. Basildon Borough Council received a C4 grading in April 2026 partly for "serious failings in its engagement with tenants"
- Complaint handling satisfaction sits at just 36% across the sector (RSH, 2024/25) - process compliance and genuine engagement are not the same thing, and the data proves it
For years, resident engagement in social housing has meant a version of the same thing: annual surveys, scrutiny panels attended by the same twelve residents, and satisfaction forms mailed to addresses that may or may not still be occupied. The results get reported to the board, the TSM submission goes in, and the cycle repeats. The data might be compliant. It is rarely transformative.
In April 2026, twenty organisations across England launched funded pilots designed to test whether genuinely different approaches - ones built around how residents actually live, not how landlords prefer to be scrutinised - can produce better outcomes for both sides. The government's Social Housing Innovation Fund, originally announced at £1 million in October 2025 alongside the first phase of Awaab's Law, was doubled to £2 million in December 2025. The resulting 20 projects are now running for 12 months. The best will be rolled out nationwide. Below are ten of those approaches in detail.
10 Interesting Approaches Worth Knowing
The 20 funded pilots span a wide range of approaches, organisations, and contexts. Here are ten that illustrate meaningfully different philosophies about what resident engagement can be - and what it might look like in your organisation.
Rather than asking residents to come to the landlord, Wigan's pilot brings housing officers directly into the neighbourhoods where residents live, via a mobile, homelike unit designed to feel inviting rather than official. The residents who most need to be heard are often the ones least likely to attend a formal meeting or navigate a digital portal. Face-to-face contact in a familiar environment lowers the threshold considerably. For organisations thinking about how to increase engagement in lower-participation estates or among older residents, this model tests a low-tech, high-trust proposition.
Wythenshawe's approach starts from a different premise: that standard engagement processes systematically exclude the residents most affected by poor services. Their pilot is designed specifically around residents who face barriers to participation - those with disabilities, those who have experienced trauma, and those with low digital access. The goal is not just to include these voices but to design services around what they reveal. This is arguably the most demanding of the ten approaches in terms of what it asks of the organisation culturally: it requires genuine receptiveness to perspectives that standard processes never surfaced.
Newham's pilot takes a specific, high-stakes problem: tenants in higher-risk buildings who need fast, direct ways to raise safety concerns. The digital platform being tested allows residents to flag issues and track progress without navigating general housing enquiry channels. With Awaab's Law phase two - expanding beyond damp and mould to structural, fire and electrical hazards - arriving in 2026, this pilot has immediate practical relevance far beyond Newham. It is testing whether a direct digital channel for safety reporting produces faster resolution, higher tenant confidence, or both.
Manningham's approach addresses a structural gap rather than a communication one. Tenant board members often arrive on boards without the confidence, context, or networks to exercise meaningful influence. The Academy is designed to change that, building leadership capacity from within the resident community so that tenant voices on boards are genuinely shaping decisions rather than fulfilling a governance requirement. The returns are slower than a digital tool, but potentially more durable - because they build institutional knowledge that stays with the organisation.
Accent's pilot approaches resident engagement through a different lens: belonging. Where most engagement projects focus on voice as a mechanism for influencing services, Belonging Begins Here asks a prior question - do residents feel connected to the community they live in, and does that connection make them more likely to engage? The theory is that belonging and participation are mutually reinforcing, and that building social connection within housing communities is itself a measurable form of tenant engagement with downstream effects on satisfaction, wellbeing, and tenancy sustainability.
Ashley Community Housing's pilot builds a Council of Elders model specifically designed to improve engagement with refugee tenants, operating from the recognition that community-led structures may be more trusted than landlord-led ones in certain populations. Rather than asking refugee residents to navigate standard engagement channels, this approach creates a structure that reflects how authority and trust actually function within those communities. It is one of the most explicitly community-sovereignty-led models in the whole fund.
Hillingdon's pilot creates an advisory panel specifically for social housing residents who have experienced domestic violence and violence against women and girls, with a direct line to housing decision-making. Residents in these circumstances have often been failed by standard housing processes - either because the process does not account for their safety needs or because they do not feel safe participating. This pilot tests whether a structured, specialist panel can both give these residents genuine influence and improve the services that most directly affect them.
Nottingham Community Housing Association's pilot puts young people's voices at the centre of housing decisions - a group that is significantly underrepresented in standard scrutiny and engagement processes, which tend to be structured around older, more established residents. The 12-month funded programme is building new mechanisms for young tenants and residents to shape services and strategy, addressing a demographic whose housing experiences and expectations differ markedly from those of longer-standing residents.
Southern Housing is leading a pilot testing what strategic resident involvement looks like across a group of large landlords simultaneously. Where most engagement programmes are confined to a single organisation, the G15 Residents' Group model asks whether residents can exercise meaningful collective influence at the level of a group of major housing providers, and whether that creates accountability that individual landlord processes cannot. This is the most structurally ambitious model in the fund, operating at a scale that, if successful, could shift how large housing groups approach resident governance.
Rooftop Housing Association's pilot is designed specifically to improve engagement with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller residents - a community that has historically faced significant barriers to participation in mainstream housing processes, and whose housing needs and experiences are frequently not reflected in standard service design. The virtual engagement model is testing whether digital channels, structured specifically around this community, can remove barriers that face-to-face or paper-based processes have not overcome.
All 20 Social Housing Innovation Fund Projects
The ten pilots above represent a cross-section of approaches. The full list of all 20 funded projects - confirmed by MHCLG in April 2026 - is below.
All 20 Funded Projects — MHCLG Social Housing Innovation Fund, April 2026
| Belonging Begins Here: Connecting Our Communities | Accent Group | £120,000 |
| Trusted Voices: A Council of Elders Model for Refugee Tenant Engagement | Ashley Community & Housing Ltd | £76,442 |
| Ermine Community Partnership | Lincoln City Council | £104,049 |
| Connected Neighbours: New Models for Tenant-Landlord Engagement | Clarion Housing Group | £119,110 |
| Our Homes | Leeds City Council | £119,371 |
| Hidden Voices to be Heard | Loconomy Ltd | £120,000 |
| Amplifying Survivor Voices: Domestic Violence and VAWG Residents | London Borough of Hillingdon | £120,000 |
| Tenant Board Member Academy: Building Leadership from Within | Manningham Housing Association | £70,000 |
| The Tenants' Voice | National Communities Resource Centre Ltd | £113,631 |
| Building Safety Resident Engagement at Scale | Newham Council | £120,000 |
| YouNG Networkers | Nottingham Community Housing Association | £98,889 |
| A National Voice for Shared Owners | The Places Foundation / Shared Ownership Resources | £120,000 |
| Richmond Community Ambassadors: Making a Difference Locally | London Borough of Richmond upon Thames | £102,316 |
| Virtual Voices: Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Engagement | Rooftop Housing Association | £75,500 |
| The G15 Residents' Group: A Model for Strategic Resident Involvement | Southern Housing / G15 Resident Group | £70,000 |
| The LGBTQ+ Housing Pledge: Tenant-Led Change | Stonewall Housing Association | £95,250 |
| Improving Resident Scrutiny | Together Housing | £103,340 |
| Breaking the Stigma: Stronger Scrutiny in Social Housing | Vico Homes | £72,368 |
| Front Room on Wheels | Wigan Borough Council | £70,000 |
| Wythenshawe Enabled: Powered by Difference | Wythenshawe Community Housing Group | £95,900 |
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Explore the platform →Why Now: The Regulatory and Policy Context
The Social Housing Innovation Fund did not emerge from nowhere. It sits at the intersection of three converging pressures that have been building since the Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023.
The first is Awaab's Law, which came into force in October 2025. Named after Awaab Ishak, who died in 2020 from respiratory illness caused by mould in his Rochdale home, the law compels social landlords to investigate and address hazards within fixed timescales. Its first phase covers damp, mould and emergency hazards. Phase two, expanding to excess cold, heat, falls, structural and fire hazards, arrives in 2026. Phase three, covering all remaining HHSRS hazards, follows in 2027. The original fund announcement accompanied Awaab's Law: government recognised that faster repair timescales mean very little if residents do not feel safe or confident raising concerns in the first place.
The second is the RSH's Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard, one of four consumer standards now actively inspected and enforced. The TIA Standard requires landlords to give tenants meaningful opportunities to scrutinise and influence strategies, policies and services - not just to be consulted. In April 2026, Basildon Borough Council was given a C4 grading, the lowest possible consumer grade, partly because of "serious failings in its engagement with tenants and a lack of meaningful opportunities for them to scrutinise landlord services."
The third is the TSM data itself. As the RSH's 2024/25 results confirmed, satisfaction with complaint handling sits at just 36% across the sector. The measures most directly linked to resident voice - TP07 (landlord listens and acts on views) and TP09 (landlord keeps tenants informed) - remain among the weaker performers. Process compliance and genuine engagement are not the same thing, and the data now proves it publicly.
"We've doubled this fund to £2 million so we can ramp up practical, real-world interventions that strengthen tenants' voices and ensure they are respected and taken seriously. The best ideas will be rolled out nationwide and tenants will shape every step."
Baroness Taylor, Lords Minister for Housing and Local Government, MHCLG, April 2026What Organisations Not in the Pilots Can Take From This
The 20 funded pilots are not a closed experiment. MHCLG has been explicit that the goal is to identify best practice and disseminate it across the sector. Results will be published, and the approaches that produce measurable improvements in resident confidence, engagement quality and service outcomes will be made available for others to adopt.
The range of approaches is itself the message. There is no single model for genuine resident engagement. What works in a high-rise block in Newham is different from what works on a low-density estate in Wigan. What reaches a trauma-affected resident in Wythenshawe is different from what builds confidence in a first-time tenant board member in Bradford. Organisations that have defaulted to one engagement channel - typically a digital survey or a residents' panel - should be asking whether that channel is reaching the residents whose voices most need to be heard, or the ones who were already most likely to participate.
The governance dimension is also unavoidable. The Basildon C4 grading is a warning to every board in the sector. Engagement is no longer assessed at the level of "do you have a residents' panel?" The RSH is now asking whether tenants have meaningful opportunities to scrutinise and influence, whether their feedback demonstrably changes decisions, and whether the most underrepresented residents are specifically supported to participate. That is a considerably higher bar than most organisations were meeting under the previous regulatory regime.
The Financial Wellbeing Connection
Tenants under sustained financial pressure disengage from landlord communications and score lower on satisfaction measures regardless of service quality. Platforms that stretch household budgets through cashback and discounts on everyday spending are increasingly used by housing associations as a complement to engagement programmes - reducing the financial pressure that prevents residents from focusing on the quality of their tenancy and engaging with scrutiny processes.
What This Means for Housing Associations in 2026
The Social Housing Innovation Fund pilots are a signal about the direction of travel, not just a collection of interesting projects. Government has concluded that the existing toolkit for resident engagement - satisfaction surveys, scrutiny panels, annual reports to residents - is not producing the outcomes the regulatory framework now requires. It has backed 20 organisations to test something different, and committed to rolling out whatever works.
For housing associations watching from the outside, the question is not "should we wait for the results?" It is "what are we doing now that we know is not reaching the residents we need to hear from, and what would it take to change that?" The pilots are running for 12 months. The regulatory expectations are already in place. The organisations that begin redesigning their engagement infrastructure now will be better positioned - both regulatorily and relationally - when the results are published.
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- GOV.UK - New £2m Backed Pilots to Put More Power in the Hands of TenantsMHCLG. April 2026. Primary source for all 20 funded projects, grant amounts, ministerial quotes from Baroness Taylor, and fund objectives.
- GOV.UK - Social Housing Innovation Fund ProspectusMHCLG. Updated December 2025. Source for fund criteria, doubling from £1m to £2m, co-production requirements.
- Housing Today - Social Housing Tenant Engagement Pilots Receive Government Funding BoostHousing Today. April 2026. Confirmed full project list, pilot descriptions and grant amounts.
- PBC Today - £2m Social Housing Innovation Fund Backs New Pilot ProjectsPBC Today. April 2026. Secondary confirmation of all 20 projects and grant amounts.
- Local Government Lawyer - Regulator Hits Basildon with Lowest Consumer GradeLocal Government Lawyer. April 2026. Source for Basildon Borough Council C4 grading and RSH findings.
- Chartered Institute of Housing - Awaab's Law is Now in ForceCIH. October 2025. Source for Awaab's Law phase one implementation and phasing schedule.
- Regulator of Social Housing - TSM Analysis 2024/25RSH. November 2025. Source for 36% complaint handling satisfaction, TSM TP07 and TP09 performance.
