The Landlord Engagement Network South-Wales (LENS), established in 2011, is a collaborative network of social landlords. Originally focused on tenant scrutiny, it has evolved to support all areas of tenant involvement and is open to any social landlord’s who work with tenants to improve services across south Wales.

There is no membership fee and members have prided themselves on achieving value for money by sharing resources, training, skills and knowledge. In person and hybrid meetings have always been a safe space to share experiences and problems faced and come up with solutions together. They say two minds are better than one so the possibilities with collective thinking are endless. Over time, membership has grown and there are currently 14 members.

Logo for Landlords Engagement Network South Wales (LENS), showing five multi-coloured figures.

Meet the Steering Group

The LENS Steering Group plays a key role in shaping and supporting the work of LENS.

We help organise and plan meetings, identify and invite guest speakers, lead on partnership initiatives, and act as a key point of contact for any LENS-related queries.

As a dedicated team, we work collaboratively to ensure LENS activities are inclusive, well-coordinated, and aligned with our shared goals.

Get to know the people behind the scenes who help drive the vision and keep things running smoothly.

Headshots of four housing organisation staff: Laetitia Davies, Leigh Caveney, Michelle McGregor, and Sarah Clayton.

Meet the partners!

Our LENS community is growing! We now have 16 landlords who are part of our network.

 

LENS group partners logos

Why not join us at one of our 2026 meetings!

We meet quarterly, with a mix of online and in-person meetings.

Tuesday 3rd Feb 10-12 on Teams

Topics:

  • Social Value
  • Guest Speaker – Emma Nicholas (National Independent Tenant Voice Cymru)

We’re kicking off our first ‘Talking shop with LENS’ session with Prezzee a voucher issuing platform that a few of you have asked about.

LENS Talking Shop – Thursday 5 Feb 10-11 on Teams

Walk-through from Prezzee about their voucher platform with examples of use from LENS members

Tuesday 5th May 11-1 in person (venue to be decided)

Tuesday 1st September 10-12 on Teams

Tuesday 1st December 12-2 – Plymouth Arms in St Fagans, Cardiff

There are no fixed agenda items, the meetings are designed to support you with what’s happening right now!

Interested? Please contact michelle.mcgregor@hafod.org.uk

Talking Shop with LENS logoNew for 2025!

Our partners told us they would like to have additional meetings to discuss specific topics.  We listened and would like to introduce Talking Shop with LENS.

We’ve held two meeting so far, where we’ve talked about how housing services are delivered across the partnership and beniffited from a HACT demo, highlighting how HACT can be used to record and monitor community benefit impact.

 

 

 

Latest news and updates from the LENS Partnership

Welsh Housing Quality Standard (WHQS)

All social landlords have a responsibility to ensure that their homes are energy efficient, safe and secure and are currently working to meet WHQS that aims to continue to improve the quality of people’s homes; sets new targets to address decarbonisation; supports efforts to reach net zero; and improves water efficiency, by March 2034.

At its heart, WHQS is a tenant focused standard, designed to upgrade social homes in a way that contributes to positive health, education and wellbeing outcomes for tenants. LENS took the opportunity to work collaboratively to deliver our common goal of implementing WHQS by raising awareness and providing consistent information about what it means for all tenants. This collaborative approach also enabled LENS to utilise partners experience shared resources and budgets.

We are proud to have involved tenants in producing a series of animated video’s to support tenants WHQS journey.

Update: LENS is delighted to share that our animated WHQS videos won the Chartered Institute of Housing hashtag Welsh Housing Awards in the Working in Partnership category.

Creating the animated video’s to help customers understand WHQS and what it means for their homes has been a real collaborative effort.

Our goal was simple: to make important information clear, accessible and genuinely helpful for our customers.

This recognition tells us that we are making a difference and we are incredibly proud of that.

Thank you to all our partners for bringing this project to life.

WHQS

Video 1: What’s it all about? (English)

Video 1: What’s it all about? (Cymraeg)

 

Video 2: Keeping you safe (English)

Video 2: Keeping you safe (Cymraeg)

 

Video 3: What it means for your home (English)

Video 3: What it means for your home (Cymraeg)

 

Video 4: What it means for your outside spaces (English)

Video 4: What it means for your outside spaces (Cymraeg)

Service Charge

We’re excited to share our collaborative Service Charge project with our LENS partners below.

Together with ten landlords, we’ve created clear and accessible animated videos to help customers better understand what service charges are and how they affect their homes.

This work was driven by customer feedback, many told us in a recent survey that service charges can be confusing, and we wanted to change that by providing simple, easy-to-follow information.

Service Charge

 

What does my service charge cover? (English)

 

 

What does my service charge cover? (Cymraeg)