With great fanfare in the dog-days of the last government, Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) were introduced amid claims that they would improve “the transparency, influence and accountability” of social landlords. The TSMs have been around a while now, but where is the promised increase in accountability?
Measuring Performance
The TSMs require all social landlords to adhere to standardised ways of collecting and reporting on aspects of their performance as directed by legislation, and landlords began publishing their scores in April. The results paint an overwhelmingly negative picture of what it is like to be a housing association tenant or resident.
Too many people living in housing association properties are not satisfied with the service being delivered by their landlord. They experience substandard repairs with long waits for work to be carried out. Homes are not well-maintained and not surprisingly, many people do not feel safe living there. Outside the home, the evidence suggests that landlords are failing to make positive contributions to neighbourhoods.
Notting Hill Genesis is one of the worst performing of the large housing associations according to their TSM scores.
Despite the propaganda about tenant engagement, housing associations do not listen to a significant proportion of tenant and resident views, and even when they acknowledge a concern, they won’t act on it. All too often, they fail to keep people informed about things that matter to them. In general, tenants and residents aren’t being treated fairly and with respect.
Most importantly of all, housing associations are not handling complaints effectively. This is critical, because if complaints handling improved, most of the other problems would disappear. This flaw is well known within the housing association sector. The Housing Ombudsman Service regularly names and shames landlords for complaint handling failures, and has issued a record number of ‘Complaint Handling Failure Orders’ over the last two years. Things are getting worse, not better.
A Scandal Ridden Sector
When the TSMs were introduced by Housing Secretary Michael Gove, he correctly said that the systems for holding landlords to account had been “too reliant on people fighting their own corner”. This is something that SHAC members would strongly agree with. But the system designed by Gove and his predecessors is responsible for this state of affairs.
As scandal after scandal surfaced, Gove directed those experiencing problems towards the RSH, First Tier Property Tribunal, and Housing Ombudsman, without addressing the imbalance of power inherent in each of these pathways. In the unequal battle which pits the tenant or resident against their immeasurably more powerful and well-connected landlord, it is the landlord who ultimately triumphs, even when the tenant’s complaint is upheld.
This individualised approach also misses the point. If thousands of end users of a service are all experiencing the same problem, it points to a systematic failing within the organisation. A similar problem beset the victims of the Post Office scandal. There was a phone line for technical help with the faulty software, but no-one acknowledged that the whole system was deeply flawed.
The worst individual score was the finding that almost 80% of Clarion tenants are dissatisfied with their landlord’s complaints handling. Clarion continues to enjoy significant government funding.
While Gove identified the right problem, he was wrong to claim that the reforms he was introducing (including the TSMs) would fix it. Just being able to “see transparently which landlords are failing to deliver what residents expect and deserve” does not automatically lead to improvement. The system requires that either the tenant or an agency acting on their behalf is able to enforce change, and it is this last section of the accountability puzzle that is still glaringly absent.
If tenants and residents were actually ‘customers’ who could choose a different landlord at will, as they could for their energy or internet supplier, TSM’s might have had value. But those in social housing do not have the luxury of moving to another landlord. For an individual with a serious disrepair for example, knowing that their landlord’s satisfaction scores are high or low makes no difference at all, and TSM’s will not fix a leaking ceiling or dangerous cladding any quicker.
Nor does public shame trigger a change in behaviour by the landlord. If so, the landscape would already be dramatically different, shaped by the aftermath of multiple public scandals. But the largest landlords, those who are the most prone to bad press, are also the most impervious to bad publicity. Each has a pre-drafted statement with an apology and promise to investigate which is trotted out every time the media spotlight turns on them. Then, when the press moves on, they continue as before.
The TSMs were introduced by government, but are managed by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH). Unhelpfully however, the RSH was not charged with publishing a table of scores for all landlords, so we have done it ourselves with a selection of landlords.
The Tenant Satisfaction Scores are Terrible
The table produced by SHAC reports the eleven ‘Tenant Perception’ TSMs for the largest 21 and smallest four housing associations. This covers almost 1.3 million households.
Click the image to view or download the spreadsheet here. Housing associations with 1,000 homes or more are required to publish their scores on their website. If your landlord isn’t listed in the table, their scores can be accessed directly instead.
For each TSM, we have indicated which landlord scored the highest (blue) and which scored the lowest (purple), but even the higher scores speak of failure. Although 91.4% of Bromford Housing Group (BHG) respondents were satisfied that their homes were safe, this still means that over 4,400 BHG tenants go to sleep every night worrying that their homes are unsafe.
Most scores however are closer to the other end of the scale. Clarion for example scored just 20% for satisfaction with complaints handling. Just 42% of Notting Hill Genesis tenants and residents believe their landlord listens to, and acts on, their concerns. And the giant Places for People was only able to scrape a satisfaction rate of 53% on repairs. These scores confirm that something has gone badly awry within the housing association sector.
With the landlords ranked by size it becomes very obvious that the worst scores are almost exclusively held by the biggest landlords, and vice versa. On the whole, smaller and more localised landlords are far more attuned to the needs of those they house, and able to deal with problems as they arise. In other words, size rather than wealth is inversely related to good performance. This runs counter to the ‘bigger is better for tenants’ mantra that is trotted out whenever two landlords wish to merge and increase the salaries of their executives.
What Next?
The promise to improve the standard of social housing and the quality of services delivered by social landlords followed a coroner’s ruling on the death of Awaab Ishak who suffered breathing difficulties from his grandmother’s mould-ridden home which was owned by Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH). Awaab died in 2020, and the ruling was published in 2022, creating a media storm. Gove was forced to (appear to) act, and said:
“Where some providers have performed poorly in the past, they have now been given ample opportunity to change their ways and to start treating residents with the respect they deserve. The time for empty promises of improvement is over …”
Michael Gove speech in full, November 2022
Two years on, we are still waiting for these empty promises to become concrete improvements. There has been no public shaming over the poor satisfaction measures. They haven’t generated any press interest, critical statements from government, nor discernible change for the better by housing associations.
Housing Today 24 November 2024
It is generally agreed that money matters far more to housing association executives than their reputational standing. Poor scores on TSMs make no impact because they have no effect on the bottom line. They have been largely ignored by the press so haven’t even tarnished the reputations of the large and badly scoring housing associations. It is clear that unless we get exposure of the TSMs, the board members will not be losing any sleep over the results, nor acting to improve the experiences of people living in social housing.
More effectively, government should start by disqualifying poor performers from government grant. So far, the only time that this penalty has been applied was to Awaab Ishak’s landlord, RBH. It was a knee-jerk response to the bad publicity when naming and shaming would not have been enough to satisfy the public outcry. But as the media frenzy melted away, so did Gove’s threat to use this sanction against others.
A more permanent solution needs to bridge the accountability gap, and the only way that this can be managed and sustained is through tenant and resident self-organisation. In this, TSMs might actually have some use, as campaign groups acting collectively to compile evidence of the sector’s failings can deploy them when lobbying for positive change.
29 August 2024
Tenant Satisfaction Measures
The Regulator of Social Housing requires landlords to survey tenants and residents on the following TSMs:
- TP01 – Overall satisfaction
- TP02 – Satisfaction with repairs
- TP03 – Satisfaction with time taken to complete most recent repair
- TP04 – Satisfaction that the home is well maintained
- TP05 – Satisfaction that the home is safe
- TP06 – Satisfaction that the landlord listens to tenant views and acts upon them
- TP07 – Satisfaction that the landlord keeps tenants informed about things that matter to them
- TP08 – Agreement that the landlord treats tenants fairly and with respect
- TP09 – Satisfaction with the landlord’s approach to handling complaints
- TP10 – Satisfaction that the landlord keeps communal areas clean and well maintained
- TP11– Satisfaction that the landlord makes a positive contribution to neighbourhoods
- TP12 – Satisfaction with the landlord’s approach to handling anti-social behaviour
- CH01 – Complaints relative to the size of the landlord
- CH02 – Complaints responded to within Complaint Handling Code timescales
- NM01 – Anti-social behaviour cases relative to the size of the landlord
- RP01 – Homes that do not meet the Decent Homes Standard
- RP02 – Repairs completed within target timescale
- BS01 – Gas safety checks
- BS02 – Fire safety checks
- BS03 – Asbestos safety checks
- BS04 – Water safety checks
- BS05 – Lift safety checks
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