Tenant’s action zone
Thursday evening saw a meeting in New Mills of people from across the
High Peak who currently attend meetings of what used by the tenants
panel but are now tenant action zone meetings.
The meeting had been called due to concerns from a variety of people
who attended the meetings that they weren't working as they should be
and following earlier consultation on what to do about them, they now
wanted our views on the final plan.
As you may recall from my post on the last local meeting, things had
seemed a bit strange there and at one of the meetings covering
elsewhere they had even voted to abolish the meeting.
Part of the problem has been that a number of areas of work that the
panel meetings used to do have been passed elsewhere such as the local
grants which are now decided by a central panel along with some new
meetings such as the tenant action zone just simply working better.
The changes are also part of the work the HPCH is doing to respond
to the tenant status service which took place last year in which a
fairly large percentage of those surveyed advising that they would
rather respond to surveys to give their views about HPCH than attend
meetings.
Anyway the new proposal is that instead of meeting in each of the
areas (north, south and central) several times a year, two meetings a
year across the whole of the High Peak will take place with the venues
where possible been in areas managed by the company with transport
been put on so people will as well as attending the meeting also get
to see different areas across the High Peak.
The format for the meetings will remain similar with part of the
meeting been set aside to the 'stalls format' with representatives of
all the various services in attendance followed by the meeting part.
The format will also allow for local groups to advertise their services.
As essentially aside from tweaks to the format the panels or action
zones as they are now called have not really changed since they
were first set up, I only hope that the decision to centralize (in a
sense) these meetings works as expected and that a little further
consideration is given to one part of the role that the panels used
to have in electing local area representatives to the forum.