How to Keep Compliance One Step Ahead of the New Regulator

The social housing reforms talked about since Grenfell are finally coming. The Social Housing Regulation Bill announced in the 2022 Queen’s Speech will bring a regulator with wider powers into being when the bill becomes law.

The regulator aims to be a powerful champion of residents’ rights to safe and decent housing. Listening to residents – and ensuring that they feel listened to – is a key objective. This is particularly true of concerns about safety and the overall standard of their homes. The expectation is that best practice will become universal.

Harsher penalties are expected if landlords don’t meet standards. Fines for providers of inadequate housing may be unlimited. Where there are concerns that stock doesn’t meet decent homes standards, the regulator will act swiftly. They will only need to give 48 hours notice before carrying out a survey.

Empowering Residents

The overriding objective of the bill is to put power into the hands of social housing tenants to hold landlords to account and improve the standard of their homes. The ability to pre-empt issues will be essential to stay one step ahead.

This doesn’t seem like an environment where social housing providers can afford to be reactive. Knowing your stock has never been more important.

But what does ‘knowing your stock’ really mean? ‘Having all of the data somewhere’ won’t be enough. There’s a huge difference between that and the data being readily accessible, properly organised and capable of flagging potential issues before they arise.

Bringing Systems Up to Scratch

The new regulator is likely to be interested in the systems used by social housing providers to manage safety compliance and customer feedback. These are pretty effective health checks for providers. Functional systems produce more guaranteed results.

One issue many providers face is having multiple organisations delivering safety compliance services – each with their own way of keeping essential data.

If your compliance data is distributed across multiple spreadsheets and supplier databases you can still bring it into a common environment and make it usable. Osborne is developing a tool to do exactly this.

For more information contact Alex McLean [email protected] or take a look at our resource centre.