The Trust has changed its approach to the all-important task of gathering reliable evidence of a community's local housing needs, aspirations and views - the evidence which forms the basis on which individual communities and the key housing players can make well-informed judgements and decisions about the numbers, types and tenures of housing options that a particular community really needs.
The Trust now prefers to gather the evidence by carrying out housing options and needs "surgeries" rather than questionnaire - based household surveys (although both methods remain available). The surgeries are held in community halls, usually over two (afternoon and evening) sessions. They give local people with real, live housing problems an opportunity to discuss their needs and aspirations with Trust staff on a one-to-one, confidential basis and reach a well-informed view about which housing option(s) would, realistically, best suit them.
In the Trust's experience, surgeries are the best way of carrying out a reality check on the actual level of real, live housing need and the housing solutions that the people involved are really looking for. By comparison, questionnaire surveys leave too many key questions insufficiently well answered - because response rates are usually lower and, no matter how well the questions are formed, doubts often remain about the reliability of some of the answers given to them e.g. where respondents may not be clear about the pros and cons of the different types of housing options and/or their need or preference for them. Questionnaire surveys can still produce useful results, however, particularly where response rates are high and HSCHT will continue to be willing to use them, where appropriate. During 2006/7 the Trust conducted 17 "surgeries" and 6 questionnaire surveys and a further 20 surgeries will be carried out during 2007/8 - Tables a) and b).