The role and function of social housing in England are being recast by sweeping reforms due to its perceived failure to act as an effective welfare service and promote social mobility. In a political context of austerity, state roll-back and welfare reform, HAs have been tasked with providing tenants with an increased range of place-based ‘welfare’ services aimed at creating ‘responsible’ active citizens.
As the remit of housing associations (HAs) has broadened, their need to engage with tenants has also become more urgent. Building on previous research this project explores social housing and new forms of tenant engagement. It focuses on the processes, sites and practices through which engagement is pursued, and experiences of staff and tenants in the engagement encounter. HAs operate at the community level between the state, market and individual; they are place-based ‘community-anchor’ organisations.
The research takes place in West London, one of the most demographically diverse areas of the UK and where there is persistently high demand for social housing. This project is conducted in collaboration with two HAs: A2Dominion and Catalyst Housing and consists of two stages of fieldwork:
- 10 'enriched' qualitative interviews with key HA experts and frontline staff, including employment coordinators, skills managers and community engagement officers, about the need for, methods and challenges of, tenant engagement. Interviews will extend to observations of the sites of tenant engagement (offices, training/ day centres, home visits, and community events) and the engagement encounter;
- 20 depth tenant interviews (conducted individually or with nuclear/multigenerational households). Interviews coupled with innovative exercises (e.g. design of individual journey maps) will deepen understanding of the sites and processes of engagement as experienced by tenants/households.
The project aims to generate new understandings of tenant engagement, welfare and governance in the social housing sector, and the localisation of housing-welfare reforms, benefiting academic and non-academic users.
Project outputs can be found here:
