All for one and one for all

There is now no more rule for one and not the other now that the Tenant Service Authority’s new regulatory regime has kicked in. For the first time all providers of public housing, whether they are housing associations or local authorities, are required to operate to the same standards. Mark Cantrell reports

Unlike home-buyers or those in the private rented sector, social housing tenants are somewhat stuck for choice; they’re not really in a position to tell their landlord where to go if they are not happy with the quality of the services they receive.

That said, of course, for all that the former can ‘shop around’ they still face more than a few practical constraints on their freedoms than general day-to-day discourse would have us accept, but compared to those in social housing, the world is essentially theirs for the taking.

If nothing else, it shows that the retail-inspired consumer model – “they’re customers not tenants” – can only be taken so far, illustrating the need for some means to ensure that tenants aren’t dismissed as – effectively what they are – a captive market.

That need to ensure tenants’ input is not essentially dismissed underlines the thinking, not just in the emergence of more open dialogue in social housing thinking over the last few years, but in the new co-regulation regime just introduced by the Tenant Services Authority (TSA).

More than ever before, the focus is on the tenant – putting them at the heart of the matter in terms of delivering acceptable standards of homes and services, dialogue and transparency, with the emphasis on tenants holding their landlord to account. Indeed, an important aspect of the co-regulation concept is that tenants are partners in the process.

“The TSA is committed to setting out a new approach for housing that ensures tenants get a fair deal. To support that approach, and underpinning our emphasis on landlords working with tenants on service delivery, we want to see tenants holding landlords to account for those services,” said Phil Morgan, the organisation’s director of tenant services.

“Resident-led self-regulation (RLSR) is one way that emphasis can be realised. Although the TSA will not prescribe the ways in which landlords and tenants work together I believe that there is much to learn from the early pioneers of RLSR that will inform discussions about the principles and practice that underpin effective tenant scrutiny.”

The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) particularly welcomed this strong emphasis on tenant scrutiny, as well as the concentration in achieving outcomes rather than meeting prescriptive requirements, but last month it warned that many housing organisations are underprepared to meet the challenges of the new regulatory regime.

“The introduction of the new regulatory system in England will inevitably mean that housing organisations will need to change and the work of housing professionals will also have to evolve,” said Richard Capie, the CIH’s director of policy and practice. “New skills and knowledge will be needed and our research shows that many organisations may be under-prepared and not fully ready to respond to what is a fundamentally new approach to regulating affordable housing.”

As the TSA revealed last November, when it published its statutory consultation on the new standards, only one in two tenants were satisfied with opportunities for involvement and only one in six felt their landlord took notice of their views.

Such figures didn’t go down well with TAROE.

“Landlords, the Housing Corporation, and others under whose watch these statistics developed, should be thoroughly ashamed of them,” the organisation responded.

“They tell us that the ‘paternalistic get what you are given culture’, identified by the National Housing Federation’s Tenant Involvement Commission is still with us, and that there is a pressing need for fundamental cultural change. The consequence of this appalling failure is that the three corner co-regulatory triangle between the TSA, landlords and tenants will not be a reality for many years.”

Old mindsets die hard if left unchallenged, clearly. Though a far cry from pitchfork-wielding tenants battering down the castle doors, the new co-regulation deal is certainly intended to a be a seismic wake up call for those organisations still lagging behind.

Feedback has already stimulated some changes to the new co-regulatory regime, so as to help social landlords to roll out their programmes to meet the new standards, as the TSA ’s board member Jim Coulter explained to delegates attending the Board Development Agency’s annual conference last month.

“We have had feedback about clarity of language on our national standards and local standards,” he said. “There are now a number of adjustments being made. What we have done is no longer call these national standards which seem to be confusing, so now they are called TSAS tandards. The local standards will no longer be called local standards but local offers. That’s where a greater clarity will kick in.”

So, regime change has arrived – ready or not.