Lucy Hilton 
17 Mar 2023
From 1st April 2023, all social housing providers in England will be required to collect Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) on factors such as repairs, safety checks, and complaints. This data will need to include both objective quantitative measures and tenant perception measures.
The aim of this new standard is threefold: to enable tenants to scrutinise and view their landlord’s performance, to give landlords insight about where they can improve, and to provide information to the Regulator of Social Housing on whether landlords are complying with the regulatory standards. The introduction of TSMs are part of the regulator’s wider programme to develop proactive consumer regulation of the social housing sector.
Landlords are expected to submit the data on their first year’s performance in the summer of 2024 and the results of those with 1,000 or more homes will be shared publicly in autumn of 2024.
Tenant Satisfaction Measures – what will be reported on?
There will be 22 tenant satisfaction measures that cover five main themes and a general overall satisfaction rating. They are either reported directly by the landlords or through tenant perception surveys.
The five main themes:
- Keeping properties in good repair
- Maintaining building safety
- Effective handling of complaints
- Respectful and helpful engagement
- Responsible neighbourhood management
How should social housing landlords collect the data?
- An external agency does not need to collect the TSMs, as long as the collection and reporting guidelines have been met
- Maximum effort must be made to use a sample that is representative of the customer population
- Landlords are responsible for making sure their survey results are meaningful, including getting enough responses and making the surveys accessible to all tenants
- The survey can be conducted through any channel (e.g., telephone, online, face to face)
- Landlords can only survey each household once a year for the Tenant Perception Measures
- The data collection can be done once a year or periodically over the year
- Providers with less than 1,000 homes will only be required to collect the perception measures once every two years
How to ensure TSM success
Managing data effectively and efficiently will be essential for landlords when the Tenant Satisfaction Measures are introduced. To manage this data correctly, many landlords will turn to software solutions to help alleviate the pressure of TSMs. This is particularly the case for landlords with multiple homes whose priority will be pulling data reports easily and ensuring no data has been missed, lost or ineffectively collected.
Not only are TSM standards a requirement, but landlords must handle their tenant’s data with care. Landlords are responsible for following the privacy and data protection laws and having a strong grip on data management is important for staying compliant. A secure and confidential solution will be essential in providing this assurance to tenants.
Ideagen Pentana Risk provides an integrated, organisation-wide repository for performance information, replacing all those spreadsheets and documents scattered across individual’s PCs.
Set up KPIs in the Performance module and easily manage the collection of TSM data:
- Easily visualise performance against target in real time with engaging reports and dashboards
- A full audit trail tracks every change to data including who made changes and why
- Extract data from business systems and spreadsheets to auto populate Ideagen Pentana Risk
- Add commentary, supporting documents and analysis to KPIs
- Warning and reminder alerts via email to ensure accountability and engagement
Bolton at Home is a registered provider of social housing
Read how they use Pentana Risk to mitigate the variety of TSM risks facing their organisation.
Read more