Preparing for Tenant Satisfaction Measures and Regulatory Changes | Webinar Q&As

Are you all set for the Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) coming into force in April 2023? Our latest webinar covers how you should be preparing to collect data on the TSMs from 1^st April, so you can report your annual performance to the Regulator of Social Housing from April 2024. Our experts were joined by Darren Watmough, Principal Consultant and Social Housing Professional, to provide you with valuable insight into changes to consumer regulation, with focus on what these changes mean for you and your tenants.

Here are the questions we received during the webinar, answered by our experts below.

When do we need to publish the statement of approach?

This will be after the 2023/24 year end when you complete the annual publication for tenants, you will publish the statement alongside the numbers. For most providers, this will be early Summer 2024.

Regarding publishing the TSMs, is it acceptable to publish using the internal systems like the workplace sites and company websites?

One of the principles around the TSMs is that they are a way for tenants to be able to understand how their landlords are performing. Landlords will need to determine the best way to share information with tenants so that they can fulfil that requirement.

The standards and measures also require transparency, so landlords should be looking at how they can best engage their tenants and enable them to understand how they are performing, alongside helping them to challenge where things are going wrong. Landlords should already be thinking about how they can engage with tenants to understand how they would like to receive information, how they can self-serve, and also how they can make their views known.

The TSMs will need to be presented as part of the annual report. The regulator has said a lot about understanding diverse needs of tenants and thinking about how you can communicate with them, ensuring that all demographic groups have access to all information. It is important to incorporate other ways of sharing information (such as web presentations), talk to tenants, explain what is coming, and find out how they would like to see the information. Get insight from tenants about the context that would be helpful to share as well.

Looking forward, thinking about transparency, is there likely to be a Customer Satisfaction and Performance ‘Leader Board’ for housing providers? / Do you think the regulators will also publish data on property compliance and safety scores for housing providers as an overall score?

We expect leader boards to be a key feature in one form or another. The regulator is going to publish all the TSMs for all providers with over 1,000 homes around Autumn 2024, so they will review the data submissions then publish those along with some commentary. It is unlikely that the regulator itself will produce a leader board, but you can expect to see the likes of Inside Housing and consultancy firms doing them as they currently do on certain topics and metrics.

Will the Regulator report back / highlight best practice / learning – what they have learnt and what might help us moving forward?

We expect so. There will likely be some parallels with the way that the regulator has delivered on value for money regulation. It can be expected that the regulator will publish the first lot of TSMs accompanied with a narrative of pointed out trends, and we can expect the regulator to go public about some of the issues with the first year of reporting. The regulator will likely point out the good features as well as some of the areas where the sector could perhaps do things a little bit differently.

Are you aware when the new information-sharing proposals outlined in the Social Housing White Paper, similar to those in the Freedom of Information Act will come into force?

The Social Housing White Paper set out proposals to introduce a new access to information scheme for social housing tenants, so that information relating to landlords is easily available. The paper specifically proposed allowing tenants or their representatives to access information related to the management of social housing held by their landlord, and also relevant information that may be held by sub-contractors. The scheme was proposed to be broadly aligned with the provisions and exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

General clauses have been included within the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill to give the regulator the power to set standards and requirements. The regulator’s implementation plan states that the TSMs will help enable the required transparency, but acknowledged that in order to deliver good quality homes and services, the new consumer standards will need to go further. The regulator sees their new consumer standards supporting the required shift in culture, accountability and in the openness of the relationship between landlords and their tenants. Further detail will no doubt be published in due course about how they will achieve that.

Do you think there is an overlap with the Building Safety Act 2022?

The requirements of the Building Safety Act 2022 focus on making sure that residents who live in higher-risk residential buildings are kept safe, and the new Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has a strong role to play in this. There are specific requirements in the Building Safety Act 2022 that require the BSR to publish learning from the mandatory occurrence reports. It will also have to publish information about its approach to regulation and what it is finding, so we can assume that there will be a Memorandum Of Understanding between the BSR and other regulators, in particular the Regulator of Social Housing. The Building Safety Regulator will likely identify issues that will be relevant to organisations and how they keep the people who live in their homes safe. It is still relatively early days, with those two organisations currently working on their new approaches.

The Building Safety Act gives powers for the regulator and the Housing Ombudsman to have reciprocal information sharing and a reciprocal duty of cooperation with the Building Safety Regulator covering higher-risk residential buildings. This will enable both of these organisations to work together with the Building Safety Regulator on areas of common interest to support each other in the delivery of their relevant functions or in issuing joint guidance to help explain their different but linked roles and responsibilities

How much of the sector is going to have exemptions (i.e., <1000 homes)? Do you see providers ‘gaming’ any element of the regime, so far?

Proportionally around 80% will have exemptions, as they own / manage fewer than 1,000 homes. There are around 200 providers who have over 1,000 homes, and around 1,200 providers that have fewer. If your organisation has fewer than 1,000 homes you must still comply with the overall requirements on service and housing quality, but there are several exemptions that the person who is doing your work on consumer regulation and TSMs will likely be grateful of.

We have not seen any gaming first-hand, however the regulator is very aware of the possibility of it occurring. Concerns are occasionally identified with value for money regulation.

Any form of gaming would indicate that an organisation is not being true to themselves or their tenants. If an approach is centred around getting around the requirements and presenting oneself in a better light, organisations will find themselves subject to scrutiny through another means as this is an opportunity for residents to speak their thoughts.

How much do you think a housing provider’s culture will impact on how successfully they are able to deliver this well?

Culture is fundamental, and linked with skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours. There are a whole series of cultural questions that providers can ask themselves, things like how much of a priority are customers and their needs? How often do these needs get talked about? Are the customer-facing staff paid as much as staff doing other activities? Do they have the resources and support to meet customer needs? Ultimately, culture is going to be particularly important.

We work with many organisations across the sector, and those that do best are the ones that have a positive culture when it comes to learning from mistakes, being open and honest, being open to challenge both internally as well as from their tenants and other stakeholders and third parties.

When organisations receive complaints or when there is something that indicates that things are not going well, they can use that as an opportunity to understand and get underneath what is going on, to ultimately take that and learn from it with a commitment to do better.

Will providers have certain priorities? Should they be asking themselves “what should I prioritise over the next three months”?

We have previously given advice on this in our Tenant Satisfaction Measures webinar in October, which you can watch on demand here.

Relating to the new regime, organisations need to look at what their governance arrangements are. Ask yourselves critically, are they fit for purpose? Do we get visibility of everything that we need to report on? Within that, do we think that there are any issues? You can do a self-assessment about what you are going to have to report on, whether you think you are able to get that information, but also what you think it might be likely to reveal. Engage with your staff and residents around this so that you can start to flush out potential issues. If you leave this until a year from now when you first report on everything, it will be too late to try and do something about it.

The key is to look at things as you go along. What is the data telling you? What can you learn from it to do better? Give visibility to your Boards, your Executive team, so that they can shine a light on where there may be issues because it could be an indication that resources are in the wrong place, they are misaligned, or that people do not have the skills and knowledge to be able to do what is required of them in this new regime. Competence is crucial to be able to deliver this and deliver it well.

The government have started to give some more detail about what they are thinking around professional qualifications for housing staff. What are your thoughts on this? And what do you think this will mean for both landlords and residents?

Information has just been released, which we are yet to have a chance to review in detail. However, it is proposed that there will be a requirement for an appropriate level housing management qualification regulated by OfQual equivalent to a Level 4 or 5 Certificate or Diploma in Housing, or equivalent to a foundation degree from the Chartered Institute of Housing.

Things like training needs assessments and being able to assess against that is going to be important. This is going to require resources and it is important to be realistic about how much time this might take. It is estimated that around 25,000 managers in the sector will be affected, which is a substantial number of individuals to upskill and train. We have seen similar issues with training people to act as Building Safety Managers.

This will be a big logistical exercise to re-train or recruit people who already have those necessary qualifications. It may also take some of the key staff away from the frontline whilst they obtain those qualifications.

What should I be doing now following these updates from the 26th of February?

Ensure you are meeting the existing home standard and start to pull together information on what qualifications your existing staff already have to see where there are gaps. If you start to gather information now on any specific property or housing related qualifications your staff have, once we know what will be required, you will be able to check your existing staff information to see whether you have any individuals who meet the criteria to gain new qualifications.

Will damp and mould become the next TSM? Big 7 rather than big 6?

It may do – there is a long process that the regulator has gone through to establish the current TSMs, therefore it is difficult to imagine them shoehorning a damp and mould measure in any time soon, however there could be new requirements which include reporting around damp and mould.

Damp and mould is a massive issue in the sector at the moment, and rightly so. The survey that the regulator did following the direction from the government back in November has indicated that there are issues in the sector, but it is not universal - some organisations are managing this relatively well, but there are organisations who are not managing it well. The regulator is a fairly pragmatic organisation and it is very sensible in terms of its approach. The English Housing Survey indicates that the bigger issues are actually in the private rented sector, and the approach to regulation should start to flush the issues within the social rented sector out soon.

The government are updating their advice around damp and mould and are updating the guidance on the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS). We expect to see more on potential unsafe conditions within homes alongside guidance on what landlords need to do in due course.

How often should landlords be publishing performance information?

Think about publishing this information on an ongoing basis. You may want to publish information on some TSMs each month, for example the information on building safety and repairs, whereas others may be published on a quarterly basis.