Fair Housing Futures Test and Learn – PRS Evaluation

Fair Housing Futures (FHF) was funded by the Nationwide Foundation’s Transforming the Private Rented Sector programme. It is a place-based collaborative programme to test and learn from interventions which improve the experience of ‘vulnerable’ people accommodated in Greater Manchester’s PRS. It has been led by a Partnership Board with representatives of all key stakeholders (landlords, tenants, agents, landlord associations, VCSE services, Local Authority and GMCA), and managed by Shelter. It commissioned research to identify the issues, and subsequently funded five test and learn projects across Greater Manchester. It will use the findings from the mapping research and these projects to influence policy and practice locally, in Greater Manchester and nationally.

Fair Housing Futures has sought to explore ground-breaking solutions to the issues and barriers that vulnerable people face when private renting. FHF’s ambition is for the private rented sector in Greater Manchester to provide more decent, genuinely affordable homes for people in need.

The evaluation aimed to:

• Drawing on the Test and Learn Grant Funded (TLGF) projects, build an understanding of what works and what doesn’t when addressing challenges in the PRS at a local level. This should be done by speaking to both landlords and tenants within Greater Manchester and considering challenges from both angles.

• Understand and analyse the specific approaches taken by each project and the problems in the PRS they were seeking to address (linking back directly to the problems identified in the mapping exercise).

• Understand to what extent the approaches taken by each project were effective in addressing problems in the PRS, assessing effectiveness from the perspective of the tenants engaged in each project.

• Bring tenant’s voices into debates around the PRS in GM by engaging them closely in the research, including using peer research approaches as appropriate, to understand their experiences of the TLGF projects.

• Suggest potential recommendations for policy and advocacy to be considered by the Programme Board of FHF.

• Provide a clear definition of what success looks like from a tenant’s perspective when projects seek to resolve problems in the PRS.

• Provide a comprehensive review of the TLGF projects’ approaches and outcomes, answering the question of what approaches have been successful and what have not in addressing problems in the PRS.

• Deliver a clear learning from FHF as a whole, linking together the problems identified during the mapping exercise and the solutions tested by the TLGF projects, and foregrounding tenants’ voices in this learning.

The evaluation was also framed by how effective the projects were in:

• Empowering tenants by raising awareness of existing services, regulation and enforcement.

• Improving communication between tenants, landlords and letting agents to enhance the renting journey.

• Supporting landlords by improving their awareness of regulation and enforcement and help them manage their experiences and expectations of being a landlord.

• Breaking the stigma of vulnerable tenants in the PRS, particularly those in receipt of benefits.

Approach

In order to explore the views of perspectives of stakeholders and tenants we adapted a qualitative approach. Particular attention was given to hear the voices of tenants and we tried to establish co-production panels and peer researchers as set out in the original plans. Each project established a key contact and identified staff members who could act as gatekeepers to help identify the sample. We engaged with the following:

Total Staff: 15

Total Tenants: 17 for the evaluation + 20 in analysis workshop

Total Landlords: 2

Total Stakeholder: 3

We held both face to face and remote individual and group interviews for all projects. We arranged staff shadowing days at three of the projects, which also included visiting tenants in their communities (Wigan and Justlife) and attending a tenant’s fair (ACORN). We also designed a short online survey for landlords and tenants to help capture initial thoughts.

In October 2022 we conducted a workshop to bring tenants across Greater Manchester together with representatives from Shelter’s Renters Voice Network. The two-hour workshop discussed the initial research findings. By using co-production techniques, the workshop was able to enabled tenants to engage in the findings and allowed them to rank and priorities what they agreed with and any further recommendations. Tenants were able to share their individual experiences as well as work in groups to find group consensus on key topics.

Outcome

Initial research findings were presented to the Fair housing Futures Board meeting in September 2022. The final report was signed off by the Board in January 2023 and publicly launched in March 2023 (attended by GM Mayer Andy Burnham MP). The report provides evidence to support Fair Housing Futures ‘Plan for Better Renting across Greater Manchester’ strategy.