Beyond Compliance – The Positive Benefits of Better Social Housing Data

The main motivation for bringing compliance data under control is to avoid potential safety failures. These put people in danger and carry potentially devastating organisational risks.

The Building Safety Bill will shortly add further weight to the need to have complete and verifiable compliance data. Yet, many social housing providers admit that this is something they lack.

Many of the reasons for data gaps are historical. Different organisations contracted to deliver safety compliance services have all collected data in their own way. Collating the data and putting it into an environment that offers a reliable snapshot of the current status, with clear flagging of any gaps, hasn’t been easy. That is, until now (more of this in a minute).

But it isn’t all about avoiding potentially negative scenarios. There are many positive advantages that come from building a data environment where you have a complete and usable picture of the compliance status of every property in your portfolio.

Planning, Scheduling and Budgeting

Safety compliance is an excellent place to start the process of building a robust stock condition database that partners can use for more effective planning, work scheduling and budgeting.

This could unlock better coordination of routine maintenance, property upgrades, voids and responsive repairs. The results will be a better use of resources and less disruption for residents.

Accurate stock condition data leads to better planning and greater efficiency. It means you can budget and plan investments with confidence.

Stock condition data is also the essential foundation of future net zero carbon retrofit programmes. Applications for funding and investment are more likely to be successful if they are based on robust and verifiable data.

Having explained earlier why managing compliance data is often difficult, here’s how it can be made easier; Osborne has developed a software tool that can extract compliance data from multiple systems in just about any format (including PDF).

It can then present all of the data in a coherent way through dashboards that tell you exactly what you need to know and what you should be concerned about. This could be the first step towards turning disparate and unstructured data into valuable business intelligence.

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