RSH announces tenant satisfaction measures sounding board

The Government’s Social Housing White Paper asks us to deliver a new consumer regulation function within the Regulator of social housing to help reset the relationship between landlords and tenants across the sector.

To implement the changes, we will need to make decisions about three broad areas. These are:

• firstly, any changes needed to our consumer standards
• secondly, our operating model for the consumer regulation which will define how we check whether providers are meeting the standards and respond if they are not
• and finally a set of tenant satisfaction measures that will help tenants and us hold providers to account and inform our regulation.

To allow enough time for implementation, we are planning to consult on a proposed set of tenant satisfaction measures in winter 2021-22, ahead of discussions and consultations on the standards and operating model. Draft tenant satisfaction measures were set out by the Government in the Social Housing White Paper. Before we can consult on the measures, we need to develop detailed proposals about how they could be implemented in practice. To help us with this, we have created a sounding board with representatives from across the sector.

Members of the tenant satisfaction measures sounding board include representatives from the following organisations.

• ARCH
• Chartered Institute of Housing
• Councils with ALMOs
• G15
• G320
• Housing Ombudsman Service
• PlaceShapers
• Local Government Association
• National Federation of ALMOs
• National Housing Federation
• Northern Housing Consortium
• TAROE
• Tpas

Alongside the TSM sounding board, we continue to engage with a wide range of sector stakeholders to understand views on tenant satisfaction measures and inform our thinking. This includes carrying out workshops with tenants. Over the coming months, we will engage further with sector stakeholders across the breadth of our work on implementing the White Paper changes.