A significant number of landlords are struggling with compliance. How can they fix this?
Inside Housing talks to Lee Woods at property surveyor Pennington Choices about what social landlords can do to prepare for building safety compliance regulatory changes
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The sector faces a number of regulatory changes, with the implementation of the Building Safety Bill and alterations to the Fire Safety Order just around the corner. We speak to Lee Woods, operations director at property surveying and consultancy business Pennington Choices, to unpick some of the issues raised in a recent survey by Inside Housing and Pennington Choices around compliance – specifically, why a significant number of social landlords are still struggling with certain areas of compliance and what measures can be put in place to address this.
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Landlords will have to demonstrate compliance in new and complex ways. How ready are they?
I look at this in two ways. First, it is about how prepared the sector is to meet the challenges of tomorrow, but more importantly, it’s also about how well the sector is doing today when it comes to compliance, because it is
a bit like running before you can walk.
Gaps remain when it comes to compliance. There are two bodies of evidence for this. The first is the survey we carried out with Inside Housing in August on safety and compliance. It demonstrated some sizable gaps across many organisations regarding their ability to comply with the current regulations, legislation and codes of practice. Then there’s our own body of work. We’ve been into more than 100 landlords in the past four to five years (representing more than 50% of the regulated sector), and we’ve seen gaps in their provisions around property compliance and resident safety.
Most of this legislation has been around for 20 years or more, so it’s not as if it’s new. I suppose that creates a concern for me, that if the sector can’t get right what it’s supposed to do today, organisations are going to struggle even more with the complex legislation that is going to be introduced in the next 18 months.
Can you give an overview of the main findings from the survey and how they fared against expectation?
The fundamental question we were trying to answer was how many organisations are currently achieving 100% compliance across the core compliance areas of gas, electrical, fire, asbestos and legionella.
Some of the headlines from that research showed only two out of 10 organisations were achieving 100% compliance for gas. That dropped to one out of 10 for electrical compliance. For asbestos, only three in 10 landlords were suggesting they had surveys and inspections in relation to all of their sites; for water, four in 10 did.
I think we expected gaps, but what surprised me was the scale of the gap in compliance – particularly when we consider the fact that much of this legislation is old.
When we looked at fire safety, we found that six out of 10 organisations don’t have fire risk assessments for all their sites. That was a very worrying statistic for me, and I think the sector has got some serious questions
to answer as to why we’re in this position.
Another element of the survey looked at the sector’s preparedness for tomorrow, which focused on where executives and boards are in this conversation, including how aware they are of their duties and obligations in relation to the Building Safety Bill. Here, only 31% said they had a detailed understanding of what was coming down the track.
The legislative changes ahead have been covered extensively in the press, so for effectively seven out of 10 boards and leaders to suggest that they don’t really understand what’s coming down the track is a concern.
Having worked in social housing for more than 27 years, Lee Woods, operations director at Pennington Choices, is an expert on property compliance, building and tenant safety, and regulations. He has supported more than 100 providers, working with boards, leaders, national bodies and the regulator to drive change. Before joining Pennington Choices, he was an executive director for two large landlords. This has given him experience of public and private sector housing.
What are some of the key barriers holding organisations back in showing compliance and keeping their residents safe?
A really big issue for me is whether or not organisations have an open culture in place. As a critical friend, we’re not there to lead or govern an organisation, but we do make clear in our reports around compliance what organisations should be doing – such as sharing the report findings with their board or having a conversation with the regulator. However, we know there are quite a few occasions where this advice has been ignored and this comes down to culture.
We see culture falling into two very distinct camps. Either leaders are very open to the idea that they might have gaps or issues to address, aiming to get everything out in the open and report anything of a material nature to the chief executive or the regulator, if they need to. This is the culture we like to see.
On the flip side you have organisations that are in denial that they have a problem, or they don’t want to acknowledge a problem is there. They certainly don’t want to raise their head above the parapet and tell the chief executive and board.
This creates a material problem where sending bad news up the food chain is simply not welcomed, and if that happens, the non-compliant issue goes underground again and doesn’t get resolved.
The new regulations will require providers to collect, monitor and manage data on their stock to demonstrate a golden thread of safety across their stock. Do you have any shareable learnings from your work around data management with organisations?
Data is like the foundation of a house: if your data is solid, then your building will be, too.
We often find that organisations’ data management processes, particularly around areas of compliance, are fragmented. This could mean they don’t have everything in one system, or they don’t have a system at all and they are managing their data in a manual way through Excel spreadsheets or manual-access databases.
Over time, it’s no surprise this data gets corrupted or lost, which means there’s no single source of truth where they can aggregate all their data across the board with respect to property compliance and resident safety.
This is why it’s critical to forensically cleanse data before it goes into any management system. We get asked a lot by organisations what systems are best for managing compliance, but systems will not fix data, they will just help to host and manage it in a more dynamic way.
Do you have any examples of good industry practice?
From the organisations we’ve worked with recently, Progress Housing Group, based in Lancashire, have got a fantastic handle on its data management approach now – probably best in class. That approach has seen them cleanse all of their data, so they understand which properties need to be on which programmes and they’ve got a clear way of tracking the movement of their assets.
All of this is in direct sight of their leadership team, who can see performance on a monthly basis, including which properties are compliant or not, or which homes they have disposed of/acquired over the past month and how that impacts their programmes of activity. So, it’s about pulling all of that information together.
Berneslai Homes and Weaver Vale Housing Trust have gone through similar processes to set up a single data source and then purchase a system after doing the data validation, rather than buying a system and hoping it fixes the problem.
