North Star is passionate about involving people in what we do. The constant improvement we seek requires effective listening and understanding. With a strong reputation for being a community focused landlord, the organisation has long been recognized for the ways we involve and engage with customers. Like many landlords, North Star has a formal structure of involvement to offer ways for customers to influence us. In addition, this year we held an event attended by c.300 customers from across the North East and during 2022/23 customers have influenced the development of our Leading and Growing to 2026 Strategy.

We recognise the world is changing and the ways we have traditionally involved customers in the past may not necessarily work in the future. Over the last year, we’ve been testing two new ways of involving customers, running a ‘citizens jury’ and an ‘online consultation platform’.

The ‘citizens jury’ focused on decarbonization and energy efficiency, picking up on work undertaken by the Northern Housing Consortium. This brought together 9 customers with an expressed interest in this subject. The group met with specialists and North Star staff working in this area and led to recommendations to inform North Star’s approach moving forward. Participation in the group was remunerated and led to participation from customers who don’t usually get involved with North Star. To progress this further, there are plans for the jury group to merge with our staff environmental group ‘Time to Act’ to ensure customers continue to inform our approach to the environment. The jury approach has been successful and will be used again in future to focus on strategic issues where customer feedback, insight and learning is required.

The second pilot used Commonplace, an online tool which facilitates effective digital consultation. This approach was used to capture customer experiences of the cost of living crisis, ahead of Board discussion on reviewing rents for 2023/24. Again, this new method meant we had engagement from customers we don’t usually hear from. The approach captured data and also customer stories of coping with the affordability crisis. This informed internal discussions of affordability and were presented to local MP Alex Cunningham to inform a parliamentary speech in March 2023. This pilot enabled feedback on a sensitive subject to be gathered speedily and anonymously. The outputs were used strategically and the platform enabled us to demonstrate to participants how their feedback had been used, improving transparency. North Star will use online consultation in future and plan to integrate this with our existing systems to improve the experience for participants.