Category: Customer Engagement, News, Social Housing
From April 2023, all social housing providers in England will be required to collect data on a new set of tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) as part of a new system developed by the Regulator of Social Housing.
These measures will be used to assess how well social housing landlords are performing and are aimed to improve standards. We’ve put together a useful guide that includes all you need to know about the regulation changes and how you can get help to ensure you’re collecting the right data from tenants.
What do the Tenant Satisfaction Measures cover?
The TSMs are grouped around five key themes as well as assessing tenants overall satisfaction and include:
- Keeping properties in good repair
- Maintaining building safety
- Respectful and helpful engagement
- Effective handling of complaints
- Responsible neighbourhood management
In total there will be 22 tenant satisfaction measures comprised of 12 tenant perception measures and 10 management information measures.
How will they be used?
The insights from these reporting standards will be used to provide visibility to tenants on how their social housing provider is doing. It will also offer valuable information to the Regulator of Social Housing and is planned to be included as part of the regulatory consumer standards.
What properties are covered?
All registered social landlords in England will need to collect and report on the TSMs. The measures apply to all types of low cost rental accommodation owned by the housing provider and low cost home ownership such as shared ownership properties.
When will reporting be required?
The new regulatory requirements will come into force on 1st April 2023, with annual reporting expected to be submitted by Summer 2024. It is planned that the results will be shared publicly in Autumn 2024 and annually thereafter.
How can a social housing provider collect data for tenant perception measures?
Housing providers are permitted to use multiple channels for their tenant surveys including telephone, online and face to face interviews.
What are the survey requirements?
Housing associations must make effort to ensure a representative sample of their customer population is surveyed. This can be done once a year or periodically, but each household can only be surveyed once per year for the perception measures. Collection and reporting guidelines need to be met and the surveys can be completed by an external agency or in-house.
Questions and response scales must meet the TSM requirements, and they should be collected via a perception survey, not through a transactional survey. Additional questions may also be included within certain parameters, for example, the overall satisfaction question must be included as the first question in the survey.
Surveys should be clearly introduced with an explanation of their purpose and outline how the results will be used.
If a provider has less than 1000 properties, it’s only required to collect the perception measures once every two years.
How can TP Tracker help housing providers fulfil their obligations?
TP Tracker is a specialist provider of social housing software and is fully geared up to support organisations with their TSM requirements. Our dynamic cloud-based software can be integrated seamlessly across multiple teams to facilitate, collate and provide vital management information for streamlined reporting and database management.
Our survey campaign feature will be of particular benefit to engagement teams. The simple and effective platform enables the easy creation of questionnaires, along with the set up and delivery of survey campaigns to gather tenant feedback – automatically collating responses for swift analysis of feedback and trends.
Learn more about our social housing database solution and get in touch for a demo.