Starting on April 1, 2023, the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) will require that all registered providers of social housing need to collect and publish a range of information on areas such as repairs, safety checks, and complaints to follow a universal set of requirements. Based on their consultation on tenant satisfaction measures (TSM), these new regulations will allow tenants to hold landlords more accountable to provide safe homes and quality service to tenants.
An online community engagement platform can help you comply with the latest regulations by providing you and your tenants with a consistent and easy-to-use hub for continuous engagement and increased transparency in line with the new rules.
What does this mean for social housing providers?
As part of RSH’s efforts to develop proactive consumer regulation of the social housing sector, social housing providers (both housing associations and local authorities) will receive feedback about their landlord performance and be required to follow additional technical requirements on the TSM data they collect and submit. From closely tracking management information to providing additional tenant perception surveys, these requirements seek to maximise tenant participation and increase transparency regarding landlords’ performance across social housing providers. Read more about the specific requirements here.
How can CitizenLab help you comply with these new social housing regulations?
Community engagement is at the core of these new social housing regulations. It’s about increasing transparency and giving your tenants the ability to have a voice in the quality and care of the place they live in. A community engagement platform will help you achieve just that while making it easy for you to analyse and report on the data you receive, both back to your tenants and RSH.
Here are three ways an online engagement platform can help you comply:
- Increase transparency between landlords and tenants: one of the new RSH regulations’ main goals is to increase transparency between landlords and tenants. Out of over 1,000 responses to the consultation, a majority supported the measures requiring the collection and sharing of more data from landlords to tenants about their buildings. To increase this level of transparency, use an online engagement platform to easily and cleanly provide information and data on repairs, building safety, and complaint handling happening at your social housing site. You can build out specific projects and folders devoted to each topic. Using project timelines, your tenants can review the information and better understand when and what improvements will be made to their housing every step of the way.
- Brand new native survey tool launching on our platform: we are in the process of launching a brand new native survey tool on the CitizenLab platform. This improvement will help you easily capture and analyse all tenant perception survey data and combine it with all other user data in the platform’s back end. This seamless data integration will make it even easier to report your survey data directly back to the tenants, close the feedback loop, and comply with the statutory consultation requirements. Launch, capture, analyse, and report on your tenant data, all on one platform.
- Develop a process for continuous engagement: everyone knows that surveys are a quick and effective way to gather data from any group of people. When residents don’t understand how and when their feedback is being used, though, consultation fatigue can settle in. Simply launching a survey is no longer enough. With an online community engagement platform, tenants can share their feedback and also track the process of consultation from start to finish. By consolidating the data collection and communication processes, an online platform provides a dedicated space for both you and your tenants to return to and promote continuous engagement. When tenants see that their input is used productively, they will be encouraged to continue to engage and provide the constructive input that RSH is looking for.
Register for our upcoming webinar on ways to build effective consultation processes to meet the new social housing regulations to learn more.
Or want to speak directly with our team of experts to learn more about how you can make sure you’re complying with the new regulations? Schedule a demo with us and we can show you how CitizenLab and an online community engagement platform can help you comply.
