Housing Association Tenant Satisfaction Scores are terrible, but it’s unclear if anything will be done about it, reports SHAC.

With great fanfare in the dog-days of the last government, Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) were introduced by the Department of Levelling Up amid claims that they would improve “the transparency, influence and accountability” of social landlords. The TSMs have been around for a while now, but despite low scores, there is no evidence of increased accountability.

What the TSMs Show

The measures 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.

The TSMs are defined by government but 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 SHAC has done this for a selection of landlords. Our table reports the 11 ‘Tenant Perception’ measures for the largest 21 and smallest four housing associations. (Download the spreadsheet here).  This covers almost 1.3 million households.  

The results show that too many people living in housing association properties are not satisfied with the service being delivered by their landlord. The  failure rate is high when the results are extrapolated for the whole of the population for each landlord and confirms that something has gone badly awry within the housing association sector:

• Although 91.4% of Bromford Housing Group (BHG) respondents were satisfied that their homes were safe, for example, this still means that over 4,400 BHG tenants go to sleep every night worrying that their homes are unsafe. 
  
  
• At the other end of the scale, Clarion scored just 20% for satisfaction with complaints handling. This equates to 138,222 tenants and residents who have not been satisfied with the way their landlord has managed their complaint. 
  
  
• Notting Hill Genesis scored 42% on satisfaction that the landlord listens to, and acts on, tenant concerns. This equates to 24,608 tenants and residents who do not agree that this happens. 
  
  
• And the giant Places for People was only able to scrape a satisfaction rate of 53% on repairs, equating to dissatisfaction for 59,413 residents. 

With the landlords ranked by size, it becomes very obvious that the worst scores are almost exclusively held by the biggest landlords. 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.

Background

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 strongly agrees with. But the system designed by Gove and his predecessors is responsible for this state of affairs.

But 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.

SHAC Secretary Suzanne Muna said of the measures: “The first round of reporting confirms for us that housing associations are failing too many of their tenants and residents, but we have no confidence that the publication of tenant satisfaction measures will fix the problems.  If tenants and residents were actually ‘customers’ who could choose a different landlord at will, they 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. If the measures were meant to publicly name and shame poor performance, this is a flawed logic. Scandal after scandal has demonstrated that the largest landlords, those who are the most prone to bad press, are also the most impervious to bad publicity.”

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.”

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 press interest, critical statements from government, nor discernible change for the better by housing associations.

Other Solutions

It is generally agreed that money matters far more than reputational standing to housing association executives. Poor scores on TSMs make no impact because they have no effect on the housing association’s bottom line. It is clear that housing association boards will not be prompted by TSMs to review and improve their performance.

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. However, it shows it can be done.

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.

SHAC is a network of tenants, residents, workers and activists in housing associations and cooperatives. SHAC campaigns to improve the lives of those who live in housing association properties and to reduce the commercialisation of the sector. Its demands include genuine tenant and resident democracy, improved repairs and maintenance services, reduced rents and service charges, better health and safety provisions for all, and an end to the exploitation of housing workers. www.shaction.org. More information on TSMs can be found here.