New consumer standards and regulatory approach
The Regulator of Social Housing's new consumer standards came into force on Monday 1 April 2024.
Who is the housing regulator?
In England, housing associations are regulated by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH), an organisation whose role is set by Parliament and is accountable to Government.
Parliament has given the regulator two main objectives:
- Economic objective: to make sure that registered providers (landlords, like us) are well-managed and financially stable
- Consumer objective: to make sure that our customers live in quality, safe homes, have choice and protection, and can hold their landlords to account.
To deliver the consumer objective, the RSH introduced a set of new consumer standards around the quality of our homes and the way we provide services to customers and people applying for housing
What are the consumer standards?
There are four new consumer standards, and from 1 April 2024 the regulator will assess landlords against them and hold them to account.
Housing providers with over 1000 homes will be regularly inspected by the regulators to ensure they're meeting the standards. As we have less than 1000 homes, we won't be routinely inspected, however we will need to be able to evidence that we're meeting the standards if required.
The four new consumer standards are:
- Safety and Quality Standard – quality of accommodation and repairs and maintenance
- Tenancy Standard – how homes are allocated/exchanged and how tenancies are managed
- Neighbourhood and Community Standard – how to ensure our customers can live in safe and well-maintained neighbourhoods and feel safe in their homes (incl. communal areas and anti-social behaviour)
- Transparency, Influence and Accountability (including Tenant Satisfaction Measures TSM) – how customers can access services, raise complaints, influence decision making and hold us to account and reporting against the TSMs
Tenant satisfaction measures
Tenant satisfaction measures (TSM) were introduced in April 2023 as a measure to assess how well social landlords in England and Wales are doing at providing quality homes and services. We will publish the results of our TSMs on our website before June 2024.
You can read a summary of the TSM requirements here.
What does this mean for our customers?
We've always had our customers at the heart of everything we do, aiming to provide comfortable, safe homes and a high-quality service.
The introduction of the new standards, and your feedback in the tenant satisfaction measures, means we're reviewing how we work in some areas to improve our service and customer satisfaction.