Social housing and the new tenant satisfaction measures

Richard Sharpe examines the impact of the new tenant satisfaction measures regime.

Labour’s key pledge in the lead-up to Rishi Sunak’s snap election announcement was the construction of 1.5 million houses across Britain, and the new Government has been consistent in its messaging in the weeks and months that have followed.

In the King’s Speech, Labour promised to “get Britain building” and on 20 November, Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner urged attendees at a conference in London to “restart your development programmes”. With confirmation in the Autumn Budget of an additional £500m funding for affordable homes and the announcement of a new 5-year rent settlement for social housing, the Government’s commitment to the sector is clear.

However, alongside the delivery of new stock, affordable housing providers such as Local Authorities and Housing Associations must also maintain and upgrade their existing properties and, since April 2023, their performance in this area has been subject to the new tenant satisfaction measures (“TSMs”) regime.

The TSMs formed part of a raft of measures introduced to amplify the voice of tenants in the wake of the Grenfell disaster in 2017 and to better judge landlords’ performance across key areas such as building safety, complaint handling, repairs, tenant engagement and neighbourhood management.

There are twenty-two TSMs of which ten are compiled via landlord data (including gas and safety checks) and twelve by way of tenant perception surveys including overall satisfaction, satisfaction with repairs (and the time taken to complete the most recent repair), satisfaction that the home is safe, satisfaction with the handling of complaints, satisfaction that the landlord listens to tenant views and acts on them and so on.

Landlords are required to obtain a sufficient number of responses based on their size to ensure a minimum degree of statistical accuracy and are free to use internal or external support to carry out the surveys.

Of note is that, whilst the questions to be posed in the tenant perception surveys are standardised, the timing and method of collecting the data are not. Landlords can (subject to various requirements) opt to carry out the surveys by way of email, post, online, text, phone or face to face with some approaches (such as the latter two) traditionally eliciting a more positive response than others.

There has been some concern that the absence of a uniform method of data collection might skew the end results however the TSMs are in their infancy and will likely evolve over time. Indeed, we only have the inaugural set of returns under the new regime to consider, analysis of which published online by both Inside Housing and data consultancy firm Housemark revealed a decline in overall tenant satisfaction from 85% five years ago to just under 70% for the period 2023/2024.

This is perhaps to be expected given the well-publicised difficulties social housing landlords have faced in maintaining their properties against a backdrop of rising costs due to the cost-of-living crisis, shortages in labour and materials, global unrest and significantly higher spending for fire safety works and remediation necessitated by damp and mould.

The expectation however is that with the Government’s renewed focus on housing, the promise of their remediation acceleration plan and Ms Rayner’s declaration that “affordable housebuilding is the beating heart of our housing plans”, we will see a concurrent improvement in the TSM results in the coming years. Implemented in the right way, they will hopefully prove to be an important factor in what is clearly a changing landscape in the provision and maintenance of social housing.

For further information or to discuss how we can help you, please contact our Social Housing team here.

Richard Sharpe is a Partner at Sharpe Pritchard LLP.

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