After six month stints looking at early years funding, Streetscene process improvement and the council website I hadn’t seen much of the people of Hull during the first 18 months of the graduate scheme.
My final six months put that right. I got to work in a team on the front line of service provision – the private housing team. They’re the people responsible for protecting the interests of private tenants and challenging unscrupulous landlords. It’s an important job.
Quite often tenants don’t know their rights and won’t realise that their landlord can be held to account. Equally they might not understand how their behaviour might be impacting their home (causing damp for example). And that’s particularly acute when English isn’t a tenant’s first language, or Britain their first home.