CIH Housing Conference- Scotland’s Housing Festival 2022

TPAS Scotland were delighted to be exhibiting and joining in on some of the sessions at this years CIH conference. The place was a buzz with people networking and sharing experiences – it was so nice to see after such a long time.

If you visited our stand at the conference, you may have enjoyed a nice bit of cake! We decorated our exhibit as if it were a tea party and we wanted to encourage people to come and speak to us and enjoy some cake. We met a lot of people who we knew from the past but also shared our information leaflets and business cards with a lot of new contacts – which was great!

On Day 1 – Helen Barton, TPAS Associate joined in on the panel at the ‘Resident engagement: How to improve our services and change our communities’ session. She was joined on the panel by Professor Paddy Gray OBE, Chair of the Wheatley Foundation and Mark Gittos, Digital Inclusion Officer from Vivid Housing Association. It was a chatty and vibrant session but what came out of it was that tenant engagement is all about communications and just talking to tenants – if you can do that and keep it up, then this should reflect in your satisfaction levels.

On Day 2 – Tony Kelly, Project Manager, TPAS Scotland took part in a session on ‘The New Scottish Social Housing Charter’. He was joined by Michael Cameron, CEO of the Scottish Housing Regulator and Craig Stirrat, CEO of Grampian Housing Association. Tony talked about how tenants have made small recommendations on changes to the new charter but overall, the new charter will be much the same.

The main messages to come out of the conference was equality, the climate emergency, the cost-of-living crisis, working together with PRS and health and well-being; but at the heart of all this was engagement. Engagement with tenants, customers, contractors, staff, and each other. It was a highly successfulconference.