If You Want Residents to Feel Safer – Start with Robust and Accountable Compliance

Feeling safe and secure in your own home should be a fundamental right and it’s one of the main drivers behind the Building Safety Bill. So, what does it take for social housing residents to have this feeling of safety?

There are many facets to the answer. As well as ‘being listened to’, a watertight compliance regime that residents have complete confidence in would be at the top of most people’s list.

That’s hardly news, of course. If residents are proactively contacted well in advance to arrange safety inspections and can see clear and accurate compliance status reports online, they will feel more safe and secure.

But compliance is complex. When substantial compliance failures come to light (as they frequently do), social housing providers are often surprised at the extent of their compliance gaps. Often, the issues can be found somewhere in the data but don’t get picked up or communicated through the right channels.

Are Different Compliance Systems a Problem?

In one recent case where a local authority self-referred to the regulator, missing compliance data spanned electrical, gas, water and asbestos safety checks. One significant factor cited by the review was: “the fact that a number of different systems were being used to capture property data, and roles and responsibilities between different teams and individuals not being clear.”

The report also highlighted issues related to risk management, information sharing, systems and governance. Each of these can only be built on accurate and accessible compliance data.

In risk management, transparency is as important as accuracy. But, open sharing of compliance and risk data is difficult if that data exists in multiple places and in different formats. That’s the reality that many large social housing providers are living with – and it’s why serious compliance failures will continue to happen.

At the most basic level, you can’t fix compliance without fixing the data and putting in systems that keep it constantly updated and easily auditable. And that’s where Osborne Property Services can help. We’ve created a compliance data management system that can extract key data from multiple systems in multiple formats and turn it into information you can use.

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