We recently told you about the new consumer standards. These came into effect from today 1 April. They are designed to help ensure that social housing landlords, like us, provide decent, safe and well-maintained homes and treat their residents with fairness and respect. You can find out how the government will regulate these new standards on their website.
What’s changed?
The consumer standards we need to meet are changing, as is the way in which the regulator will assess and report on them. The regulator will have greater powers to inspect and enforce the new requirements and will carry out regular inspections to check we’re meeting both the economic and consumer standards.
The new consumer standards cover:
- Safety and quality, requiring landlords to provide safe and good quality homes and landlord services to tenants.
- Transparency, influence and accountability, requiring landlords to be open with tenants and treat them with fairness and respect so that tenants can access services, raise complaints when necessary, influence decision making and hold their landlord to account.
- Neighbourhood and community, requiring landlords to engage with other relevant parties so that tenants can live in safe and well-maintained neighbourhoods and feel safe in their homes.
- Tenancy, setting requirements for the fair allocation and letting of homes and for how those tenancies are managed and ended by landlords.
Other new measures
In April 2023, we told you about the introduction of national tenant satisfaction measures by the regulator. Those require all social housing providers to collect and publish a range of comparable information on areas such as repairs, safety checks and complaints.
Some tenant satisfaction measures are assessed by landlords directly and others by landlords carrying out tenant perception surveys. The new measures will help enable you to scrutinise our performance, as well as provide insight about where we can improve. The regulator will also use this information to see if we’re meeting the regulatory standards.
