With one week to go to the deadline for contributions to the crafting of new Consumer Standards – the regulations that set out what is expected of social landlords – we asked two members of our Tenant Advisory Panel to give us a residents’-eye view of the proposals. April Halpin is a tenant and board member at Solihull Community Housing, and Bob McGechan chairs the customer scrutiny panel at Stockport Homes. You can have your say on the proposals up to 6pm on Tuesday, 17 October.

Access the consumer standards consultation portal.

What are the core principles you want the Regulator to keep in mind when the new Consumer Regulations are being finalised?

April:

Make sure that the customer’s voice is always heard and that everyone involved in drafting the new regulations remembers that this is not just about property, it’s about someone’s home. I’m sometimes not convinced that the politicians are quite on board with that message yet, but it’s the fundamental point of all these new regulations. Also, it can’t just be about damp and mould. It has to tackle wider disrepair issues and make sure people live in a safe and well-maintained home.

Bob:

These are key points for me too, and I would add that proper tenant scrutiny should be part of every landlord’s operation and it must be part of a system that genuinely holds landlords to account. I’ve heard a lot about housing providers who pay lip service to scrutiny, where operational staff ‘adjust’ tenant scrutiny reports before they reach boards and executive staff. In one instance, a tenant said to me: “When we do a report, it goes first to the service. And the service then almost rewrites the report before it goes to board.” That isn’t scrutiny to me. And in this new climate of regulation, I am sure that dispensing with tenant scrutiny is the very opposite of what the Regulator will be expecting to see.

We know there are several models of tenant scrutiny and landlords are fairly free to choose which model they put in place; but is it time the Regulator gave landlords at least a minimum framework for what scrutiny should look like?

April:

We know that sometimes the problem is getting tenants involved at all. So, you can’t impose a model that only says ‘join this board, join that association’. It’s about finding a number of different ways to ask tenants what they think about their landlord’s work. Our engagement officer at Solihull has a team that actually goes to the tenants, talking to them on the street or doing pop-up information and feedback stalls. A lot of tenants are very put off by anything that looks too corporate.

Bob:

I think some benchmarking would be helpful. Standards do need to be set for how much effort landlords put into tenant engagement, and I’d be very much in favour of expecting landlords to validate what they do through recognized accreditation pathways, like the one offered by the national tenants’ organisation Tpas. And, of course, making sure that this kind of accreditation can also be taken away if standards slip.

Updating of the consumer regulations is long overdue – but can landlords afford to put new regulations into practice?

Bob:

Social landlords have limited resources, and of course that has to be taken into account. But at the same time, proper engagement can save a lot of money. Our repairs service came to us last week to say they were thinking of extending the time in which normal repairs get done from 20 days to 30 days – because they want to improve the service and deliver more ‘right at first attempt’ repairs. So, for instance, it can be hard to set up even a first appointment that suits the customer if you can’t give them enough notice, and certainly it’s expensive to follow up if they aren’t in or if the response is so hurried that it has to be revisited. As a scrutiny panel, we can see that this will save money – and we’ve said yes, but we’d like to be able to monitor that.

April:

As involved tenants, we know that when all the basics are right – a good maintenance system, a good contact centre, good culture and attitude towards customers – all the other things fall into place. And as ALMO residents, we also feel quite lucky that our landlord is a relatively small housing organisation with deep roots in the community and working alongside our local council. At the same time, we know that our ALMO staff can just concentrate on the housing and get the job done because they are just that little bit distant from the council. On the tenant grapevine, we hear of ALMO tenants who live a street away from tenants whose homes are run directly by local government officers within councils, and it’s often a very different experience, and often not in a good way. I’ve lived in the same area all my life and I can compare how it was before to the last 20 years of ALMO management – it really has made a difference.

Bob:

During my working life as a housing officer, I saw how the quality of housing management depended very much on leadership, and on the attitudes of staff. Every member of an ALMO’s staff is focused on housing. That’s not always the case with a council housing department. When the new consumer regulations come into effect, that will surely make a difference to how well they are implemented.

What most impresses you about the proposals so far for updating the consumer regulations?

April:

There is a real sense that at last those making decisions about regulation really want to hear about people with disabilities. It seems perhaps they still don’t want to hear from the carers’ point of view, but while it’s not perfect, it’s great that disabled people themselves are being listened to.

Is anything missing?

Bob:

A full survey of all a landlord’s properties should be routine and compulsory, starting now. Perhaps the Regulator could tell them all that they must have a full survey done within, say, the next five years. And these should be surveys that look at every individual property, not just cloned from an inspection of, say, 10 per cent of the stock that some landlords have routinely relied. Experience now tells us that in the long run, when a landlord doesn’t have a true picture of the state of its homes, it costs a hell of a lot of money. Cloning surveys should in fact be banned.

April:

Agreed, because a good survey also has to be about the people who are behind the door. Are they young, single, isolated, overcrowded, elderly, disabled and so on. That’s the kind of detail the consumer standards should be focused on. With that information, you can build the housing service people need rather than the one the landlord thinks tenants want.