Data – Don’t be Caught Out by the Sleeping Giant

Alex McLean, Head of Compliance at Osborne, discusses the often-overwhelming issue of manging the live status and condition of all your housing stock.

There is a great deal of information to coordinate to get a comprehensive and reliable overview of compliance. While it’s not acceptable, it’s easy to understand how vital checks and audits can be missed. Alex argues that it all starts with data compliance checks, but these checks generate a vast amount of data for large social housing providers to understand and manage.

This burden of data is destined only to get worse with the added demands generated by net zero initiatives. A fifth of councils have not yet published a plan to tackle climate change despite many declaring a climate emergency. Decarbonising the housing stock is certain to be a priority action both in already developed plans and in those climate change plans not yet started! Alex’s view is that data is a sleeping giant, and if ignored now will significantly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of achieving housing compliance and thereby the priority of absolute certainty you have a portfolio of safe and secure homes.

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 vital safety checks being missed will be drastically reduced. An asset management strategy can then be built around accurate and consistent data.

Alex adds that Osborne has a resolution for these challenges. Using intelligent compliance software incorporating PDF readers that validate and interrogate certification and servicing data electronically. All this is organised and collated into live dashboard reporting and supported by a specialist compliance team to promptly action the identified priorities.

For more information, please contact Alex Mclean by email [email protected] or visit our resource centre or browse our case studies.