Project date – February 2024
Project brief
Equality and Diversity review was commissioned to provide assurance that our current approach to successions and assignments doesn't suffer from unintentional bias towards particular tenant groups. The review will scrutinise our current approach to successions and assignments through the lens of diversity and inclusion and highlight areas of potential unintentional bias or exclusion.
Recommendations
- The decision made regarding a discretion should be audited and signed off by a manager separate to the process. This will ensure that there has been no bias within the process.
- Enhance the logging and reporting of successions and the use of discretion. More options should be available on Northgate to allow identifiable outcome codes and reasoning for a decision without the need for a deep dive.
- All demographic information for the new tenant should be collected at the time an application to succeed is made.
- Create a focus group with tenants and stakeholders, to ascertain how this policy should be communicated, with the aim of fair and equitable outcomes from this service, and future data being reflective of this.
- A further review of the data in 12 months to seek further assurance that there is fair and equitable access to the process.
Action update
We've created guidance and a process for the signing off process of discretion cases by a manager, this process ensures that discretion is applied equitably to all. We have updated the business actions in relation to the death of a tenant to show whether a succession or offer of alternative accommodation has taken place. The aids and adaptations policy has been reviewed and changed to reflect that all demographic data is collected at the application stage of succession or offer of accommodation.
Impact Review
We've reviewed information from tenants who have requested a succession, which has helped us improve our checks and better understand who is using this service.
Because only a small number of tenants use this service, we'll keep monitoring the information we collect and look at it again when we review the policy. We'll also complete an Equality Impact Assessment to make sure the policy is fair for everyone.
We're also continuing to improve how we collect tenant demographic information during the succession process and we're working with the Tenancy Services team to strengthen this further.
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Related articles
One of our core values is that we treat all of our tenants fairly and with respect, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or religious belief.
Recently our Tenant Scrutiny team, along with some of our Involved Tenants, took a look into our Successions service to make sure that it’s living up to this value.
