Sustainable Compliance Management Prepares You for the Unexpected

The story behind any social housing compliance failure often involves unexpected and unplanned events. And when major failures happen, where do you strike the balance between taking urgent action and implementing long-term sustainable solutions?

The other key question is whether you can accurately predict future events. And, if you can’t, how can you mitigate their impact?

Why Compliance Failures Happen

Under-investment as a result of long-term reductions in local authority funding is often a factor in compliance failures. Reducing central government support by £16bn between 2010 and 2020 inevitably had consequences across many areas of service delivery.

Other failures occur because of the complexity of delivering safety compliance checks for thousands of properties using multiple service providers. The Covid-19 pandemic and labour shortages made a challenging situation more difficult.

There are also random factors such as cyber attacks and data loss to contend with.

Residents living in unsafe or unfit homes tend not to care how the situation arose. Likewise, the regulator will want to understand what actions social housing providers are taking to prevent future compliance failures as well as rectify the immediate situation.

Prevention or Cure?

Where there have been systematic failures in compliance regimes and large numbers of safety checks have been missed, the immediate priority is often to throw resources at the issue to clear the backlog. The question then is; what next? How confident can you be that you have the right safeguards in place to prevent future issues?

Events beyond the control of social housing providers will always happen. Who could have predicted or prepared for something on the scale of Covid-19, for example? But it’s a reasonable assumption that when providers have compliance data management firmly under control, they’re far less exposed to the risks and better able to manage their way through the uncertainty.

Sustainable compliance regimes are built on sound data management. This is possible to achieve even if you have multiple service providers using different systems for recording compliance data.

Osborne are currently in the process of creating a tool that can extract data in just about any format and present it in a fully integrated data dashboard. Social housing providers will then be able to instantly get an overview of compliance status, prevent failures from occurring and react to events in a more sure-footed way.

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