Are You Really on Top of Your Compliance Risks and Responsibilities?

Alex Mclean, Head of Compliance at Osborne, outlines the challenges ahead for housing providers, councillors, and their officers in identifying and mitigating risks associated with maintaining public housing stock fit for human habitation.

The Sector Risk Profile (SRP) published by The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) in October 2021 sets out RHS’s view of the most significant sources of risk to housing providers’ ongoing compliance with RHS’s regulatory standards. It remains the responsibility of housing providers to meet regulatory standards and to determine how this is done.

The SRP groups risks into four sections. Strategic risks, operational existing stock and service delivery, operational development risks and financial and treasury management risks.

The operational risks include some fundamental issues such as existing stock quality, service delivery to residents, health and safety, data integrity and security. These are likely to be the major areas of concern to residents and are the issues attracting growing resident claims against social housing providers.

Compliance checks generate a vast amount of data for large social housing providers to manage. This burden will be added to by net zero initiatives. When information comes from multiple sources, in inconsistent formats, just collating the data is a difficult task. Validating the data and interrogating it to support planning and decision making quickly becomes next to impossible when property and compliance service provision is highly fragmented.

Bringing together a multidisciplinary team to specifically tackle compliance issues will help. But this team will need accurate and usable data to work from. There’s also the issue of maintaining 100% compliance in the longer term once the team has completed the initial catch-up exercise.

Getting the data under control is the first step towards 100% safety compliance, 100% of the time. This requires the capability to take data feeds from multiple sources, extract key data, and present consolidated data in a clear format that highlights compliance gaps. With well-organised and reliable data, social landlords can stop working in the dark. The risk of operational risks such as vital safety checks being missed will be drastically reduced.

An asset management strategy can then be built around accurate and consistent data. After all, how can you manage your operational risks when you have no clear picture of both the quality and the degree of compliance of your housing stock.

For more information, please contact Alex McLean ([email protected]) or visit our resource centre and browse our case studies.