How to Prepare for Proactive Consumer Regulation

The coming proactive consumer regulation for social housing is causing plenty of debate. What will it look like in practice and what will it mean for providers? While we don’t know everything, the direction of travel and intent behind the regulations are clear.

Kate Dodsworth, Director of Consumer Regulation at the Regulator of Social Housing, gave providers a pretty clear steer in an Inside Housing article that they should be preparing for the new regulations already:

“Overwhelmingly, the two most frequent concerns were about communication and repairs. Getting the right focus at board and councillor level now will go a long way to helping landlords when the proactive regime goes live.”

Consumers

One thing to note is the use of language. It doesn’t talk about residents or tenants, it talks about consumers. This isn’t just wordplay – it signifies a more equal relationship where residents have power and choice. The regulatory regime will be how that power is exercised on their behalf.

The other key term is ‘proactive’. The key difference between proactive regulation and the current reactive regime is that there won’t need to be a complaint or major failure before the regulator becomes involved. The aim is to prevent issues by identifying risks and areas of poor practice.

Are You Good Listeners?

One key outcome for proactive consumer regulation is to ensure that residents are effectively engaged and listened to. The first question might therefore be ‘How do we do this today?’, closely followed by ‘How do we know whether it’s working?’

Co-creation has to be the way forward. Designing consultation and fault reporting systems with residents rather than for residents will always get you to a better result. The regulator will be asking for residents’ views about how well they are consulted and listened to in due course – so social housing providers may as well start doing it now.

What Happens when a Fault is Reported?

It isn’t all about what happens at the front end. Consultations with residents about the new regulations and investigations into regulatory failures suggest that reporting faults isn’t the issue – it’s getting something done about them that causes the most frustration.

A useful exercise every social housing provider could do in preparation for the new regulations is to map the workflow for repairs after they are reported. Some key questions:

• How much is automated and how much relies on people remembering to do things?
• Is there an easy and visible way to log all outstanding repairs and how long they have been open?
• Based on the data we have, where do most problems, missed communications and bottlenecks happen?
• Does allocation of operatives and materials to repairs rely on manual processes?
• Is there a protocol to automatically ‘flag and escalate’ potential issues or repairs that have been outstanding beyond a specified period?

Ensuring that asset management and repairs and maintenance services are digitally enabled will be an important part of risk management. This takes time to achieve – so it may be best to start the process sooner rather than later. In our experience it’s usually self-financing on the longer term.

Enforcing consumer standards will become proactive instead of reactive. There’s a clear business case for social housing providers to make the same switch in emphasis for how they manage repairs and resident engagement.

To find out more contact Jo Fletcher ([email protected]) or take a look at our resource centre.