The Better Social Housing Review: what the data says about challenges facing landlords

Impact of perception surveys

In England, the new regulatory tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) need to be sourced from a perception survey, as is already the case in Scotland. However, we frequently come across social landlords in England reporting an overall satisfaction measure to their executives and boards based on the results of a transactional survey.

While transactional surveys can be of immense value in tackling service failures and managing contractors, they are less useful when it comes to governance. Transactional surveys typically produce satisfaction results that are 15 percentage points higher than perception survey results.

“While there are clear examples of good practice, figures for the sector suggest the average repairs service needs improvement”

This can cause misunderstanding at executive and board level, with transactional satisfaction about repairs typically over 90%, while the tenant perception of the repairs service – which is the regulatory metric – is usually between 60% and 80%.

To avoid reporting figures that could be misleading, landlords should prioritise perception results when reporting to residents and boards. Where transactional survey results are used to complement the understanding of the tenant experience, they should be clearly labelled as such.

Defining an excellent repairs service

Housing associations are being asked to partner with tenants, contractors and frontline staff to develop and apply new standards defining what an excellent maintenance and repairs process looks like. While there are clear examples of good practice, figures for the sector suggest the average repairs service needs improvement.

For instance, the average time taken to answer inbound telephone calls has doubled over the past two years and the end-to-end time for completing repairs has increased 33% over the same period.

Repairs completions continue to lag behind pre-pandemic volumes as landlords and contractors struggle with rising materials costs and staff turnover. We recorded a 20% increase in the number of complaints received between October and November across the UK, although this in part is driven by changes to the English Housing Ombudsman’s code.

With these challenging trends seen across the full range of repairs performance indicators, it is little surprise that overall satisfaction is declining. Leading landlords are now moving beyond consultation with residents towards co-designing services right from the start, in line with the third recommendation of the review.

Auditing all homes

Without question, the recommendation that poses the biggest challenge to social housing providers is the audit of all social housing stock in England. This will be a resource-intensive process, which is likely to take much longer than housing secretary Michael Gove would like.

Many landlords will be starting on the back foot.

Current data on stock quality can be patchy, inconsistent and difficult to audit. Housemark has supported the development of the HACT’s data standards mentioned in the review, which are a great place to start. But many landlords have a significant amount of work to do to align their data systems to the standards and gather the data required.

Bigger patch sizes are not always better

The review also highlighted the vital role frontline housing officers play and calls for them to be properly trained and resourced. Housemark data shows that over the past decade, housing officer patch sizes have slowly crept up – and in some cases now exceed 1,000 properties per officer.

Meanwhile housing officers are typically dealing with high volumes of increasingly complex issues relating to mental health, anti-social behaviour and tenancy sustainment. While housing officer responsibilities can vary between organisations, our data clearly shows that smaller patch-sizes correlate with better overall performance.

Compliance success

It’s not all challenging news, though. The success of building safety compliance teams shows what can be achieved in the social housing sector when clear regulation, organisational strategy and operational objectives are aligned. This is evident in the number of homes that have a valid gas safety certificate (99.99%) and those that have an electrical installation condition report certificate up to five years old (98.3%). 

Social landlords won’t have read anything new in the Better Social Housing Review recommendations, and many have already started the journey. But once they interrogate their data and see the size of the task that lays ahead of them, they may take a collective gulp.

Jonathan Cox, director of data, Housemark