Beyond Regulations – How To Make Social Housing Safer

When things go wrong and disasters happen the natural reaction is to bring in new checks and regulations. This happens in all walks of life.

But enacting new regulations is only part of the story. There also has to be a culture and system of compliance. For any major incident, there’s a valid argument over whether tighter regulation would have prevented it, or whether 100% compliance with existing standards would have worked.

An environment where there are significant knowledge gaps in compliance data can never be completely safe. And any organisation that lacks total confidence in the completeness, currency and accuracy of compliance data is in a risky position.

The Building Safety Bill will be a major step forward for social housing residents. But the hope has to be that neither tenants nor the regulator will need to use the powers that the legislation will give them to ensure that homes are safe.

A similar argument could be made with the Homes (Fit for Human Habitation) Act. If social landlords are on top of compliance data, housing condition claims should never arise.

Why is Compliance a Problem?

Any flaws in the compliance regime will become even more exposed when the Building Safety Bill becomes law.

The biggest difficulty with compliance is usually complexity. A social landlord with a large portfolio could have many different organisations delivering property services and safety checks. If each has their own way of maintaining data it becomes a huge task to collect information – never mind use it purposefully.

The first step towards meeting the compliance challenge is to get on top of real-time data management.

Osborne has developed an innovative solution to streamline the collection of compliance data. It doesn’t matter how many data feeds you have or how many different formats your supply chain uses. The solution can easily extract the data you need and present a comprehensive real-time picture of compliance status. You can then pinpoint where you need to take action to maintain 100% compliance and avoid issues arising.

For more information, visit our free housing compliance resource centre or contact Alex McLean ([email protected]).