Earlier this year, the NFA board agreed a grant of £1500 to the organisation, contributing to research that has fed into the launch this month of The Tackling Stigma Journey Planner, co-authored by Campaign Director Nic Bliss, Mercy Denedo of the University of Durham and Amanze Ejiogu of the Sheffield Business School.

The journey planner aims to help landlords demonstrate compliance with many of the newly revised Consumer Standards and some aspects of the social housing Governance Standard. It helps explain what it means for landlords to treat tenants with fairness and respect, and how that can be demonstrated to the Regulator of Social Housing during inspection.

“Whilst the regulatory standards are about the outcomes landlords are expected to achieve, the tackling stigma journey planner is based on shared common ground between landlords and tenants,” says Nic Bliss.

“We want to help develop hearts and minds support for what tenants want and what landlords are required to do. This is a flexible tool designed to help tenants and landlords to work together on plans to tackle social housing stigma.”

Alongside the Journey Planner, other resources developed from the research can be downloaded from the campaign website. They include:

• a set of case studies  of the landlords who worked on pilot programmes from which the Journey Planner was refined;
• a research report, written by Journey Planner co-authors Dr Mercy Denedo and Professor Amanze Ejiogu, detailing recommendations for government and landlords that emerged from the work;
• tenants and others talking about social housing stigma – a highlights video and the full set of interviews.

Despite being raised by tenants as a key issue immediately after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the feeling many residents expressed that they were regarded as second class citizens has barely been addressed by the regulatory changes since then.

A recent report by the G15 group of housing associations found that nearly half their tenants feel stigmatised; of those, nearly half feel stigmatised because of something their landlord has done.

The Prime Minister recently acknowledged that regulation change was not enough and only a wholesale cultural change in the social housing sector could effectively challenge stigma.

“The journey planner is a clear and really useful framework that tenants and landlords can work through together, in a methodical way, and hopefully stimulate fruitful conversations that have real impact. We are very pleased to have been able to support such a constructive and positive piece of work,” said NFA Head of Policy Lisa Birchall.