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The Centre has begun working on a new project with an organisation specialising in tenant empowerment and a number of registered social landlords (RSLs) who were chosen last year as the Tenant Services Authority’s Co-Regulatory Champions for their work on tenant scrutiny and empowerment. The Co-Regulatory Champions programme sought to recognise leading practice in tenant scrutiny and empowerment and provided funding for the organisations to share their learning and good practice with others.Our project will be aiming to provide a legacy for the programme in the form of a publication of good practice and analysis of what makes for excellence in tenant scrutiny. As well as the compendium of case studies we will also produce a short ‘tenant-friendly’ top tips guide to help other groups of tenants and landlords get started on tenant scrutiny. CfPS director Jessica Crowe has also been asked to speak at a major northern housing conference for tenants in November on the principles of effective scrutiny and lessons from local government overview and scrutiny.

The project is important for a number of reasons. Purely from the point of view of CfPS, it introduces us to a new market where we have not been greatly engaged previously but where we feel we have a great deal to offer. More importantly, the new approach to housing regulation places great emphasis on the role of tenants’ scrutiny panels to hold landlords to account, rather than the previous regime of Audit Commission and Tenant Services Authority (also soon to be abolished) inspections and assessment. In this sense, it is similar to the changes in the local government sector, with self-regulation and improvement replacing central regulation and direction.It is encouraging that scrutiny is seen as having an important role to play in both sectors, and we hope that this project will enable us to spread our experience about what constitutes good scrutiny into a new sector and help fulfil our mission of promoting the value of effective scrutiny and accountability across all public services. As the project progresses we will provide further updates: it may well be the case that the experience of the Co-Regulatory Champions will equally provide lessons for local government scrutineers, particularly around how to engage and involve customers and service users in the process of scrutiny. For more information contact Jessica Crowe on jessica.crowe@cfps.org.uk