Social Housing Regulation
The Regulator of Social Housing sets the standards for how we manage your home, support you with your tenancy and respond to your service requests.
This is to ensure that we:
The Regulator of Social Housing has four consumer standards:
1.The Safety and Quality Standard which requires us to provide safe and good quality homes for tenants along with good quality landlord services.
2.The Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard which requires us to be open with tenants and treat them fairly and with respect so that they can access services, raise concerns when necessary, influence decision making and hold us to account.
3.The Tenancy Standard which sets out requirements for the fair allocation and letting of homes, as well as how tenancies are managed.
4. The Neighbourhood and Community Standard which requires us to engage with other agencies so that tenants can live in safe and well maintained neighbourhoods and feel safe in their home.
Accountable persons for Consumer Standards
Damian Williams as Corporate Director (Operations and Delivery) is responsible for overseeing the delivery of all landlord services and so is responsible for ensuring our overall compliance with the Regulator of Social Housing’s Consumer Standards.
He is supported by Andy White (Assistant Director – Building and Public Realm) and Tim Clarke(Assistant Director – Housing and Environment).
Andy manages the repairs, maintenance and investment service and is responsible for overseeing compliance with the Safety and Quality Standard.
Tim manages tenancy and neighbourhood management services and is responsible for overseeing compliance with the Tenancy Standard and the Neighbourhood and Community Standard.
The Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard covers all landlord services and the above members of staff are jointly responsible for overseeing compliance with this standard.
The Council’s Portfolio Holder with responsibility for Housing, Councillor Andy Baker, is responsible for scrutinising the landlord services provided to ensure that the outcomes of the consumer standards are being delivered.
Tenant Satisfaction Measures
Since April 2023, along with other landlords of social housing, we have been required to collect performance information against 22 national Tenant Satisfaction Measures(TSMs).
Tenant Satisfaction Measures are (TSMs)are metrics that all social landlords in England have to collect and report onto the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH).
There are 22 TSMs and these are grouped into the following five themes
Ten of the TSMs are measured by landlords through their performance indicators and 12 will be measured by an annual tenant perception survey. The RSH also sets out its requirements(including mandatory questions and methodology) for data collection and reporting.
You can find out how well we performed against each of these measures 2023/24 here
You can also read about how we carried out this survey here and view a copy of the questionnaire used here
Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code Self- Assessment
The Council is a member of the Housing Ombudsman Service. The Housing Ombudsman is an impartial service available to all social housing tenants to support them to resolve disputes with their landlord.
The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code sets out good practice for how landlords handle complaints.
The purpose of the Code is to enable landlords to resolve complaints raised by their residents quickly and to learn from complaints to drive service improvements. It also aims to help to create a positive complaint handling culture amongst staff and residents.
The Code sets out specific requirements for landlords that will allow them to respond to complaints effectively and fairly.
You can read more about this code on the Housing Ombudsman’s website
The Housing Ombudsman expects landlords to carry out a yearly self-assessment to make sure they are complying with the code.
You can read our self-assessment here
Annual complaints and service improvement report
We are also required to produce an annual report showing how we have performed in handling complaints and setting out how we have and intend to learn from the complaints we have received.
You can read this report here.
Our self- assessment and complaints report was presented to the Council’s Cabinet in May 2024 and their response was as follows:
We thank Councillor Baker for presenting this report to Cabinet today. We fully endorse everything that he has said and warmly welcome the content of the report and its recommendations.
As a Cabinet we recognise the importance of providing good quality housing and that responding to complaints forms an important part of that service.
We fully support and adopt the Housing Ombudsman’s revised complaint handling code and are committed to high quality complaint handling. It is important that we learn from all complaints and provide a positive response.
We support Councillor Baker, as Housing Portfolio Holder, taking on responsibility for housing complaints and he will ensure that we as a Cabinet receive regular information and updates on complaints, in particular, what they tell us about our housing service, what we have learnt from them and what we have done to put things right.
It is notable that the number of complaints received has been increasing and that is something that will be explored over the coming months to see what we can do better as part of a programme of continuous improvement for our housing service.”
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