Why transparency has become a no-brainer

The Regulator of Social Housing is now demanding much greater transparency from social landlords. Here is what they say (from the Requirement of Consumer Standards, the Safety and Quality Standard):

Registered providers must

• have an accurate, up to date and evidenced understanding of the condition of their homes that reliably informs their provision of good quality, well maintained and safe homes for tenants .
• have an accurate record at an individual property level of the condition of their stock, based on a physical assessment of all homes and keep this up to date.
• use data from across their records on stock condition to inform their provision of good quality, well maintained and safe homes for tenants including: a) Compliance with health and safety legal requirements b) Compliance with the Decent Homes Standard c) Delivery of repairs, maintenance and planned improvements to stock d) Allocating homes with adaptations appropriately.“

This seems to require that social landlords must understand, in detail, their stock holdings, which must be shared, on demand, with the regulator and (why not?) with tenants.

In addition there is the new Access to Information requirement which has been brought in because the Freedom of Information Act does not currently apply to the housing association sector.

Now registered providers must

• make more information available to residents through a publication scheme. If residents cannot find what they are looking for, they can ask their provider for it,

• determine if the request is eligible, and the information held. They must promptly respond to the request. If the resident is not happy they can complain first to their landlord, then to the Ombudsman, who has the power to challenge the decision.

In the Better Social Housing Review Recommendation the two bodies that represent the sector, the CIH and the NHF, have made the right commitment: “Housing associations should work together to conduct and publish a thorough audit of all social housing in England.” It seems we are all on the same page.

The time has come for the sector to respond positively to the transparency challenge.

Rather than focusing on compliance, maybe we should go beyond the requirements of regulators and take control? Rather than being defensive and secretive, even a little embarrassed or ashamed, let’s sign up to become Open Data organisations, sharing everything we have that could be of use to our residents.

Currently there is no list of social housing in the UK. There is no comprehensive, consistently measured picture of the state of social housing. For example, even EPC data which is already available for every social housing unit has been inputted by hundreds of assessors and is expressed in various different ways, meaning it is not machine readable. Take this across all the stock data housing associations hold and its a hot mess.

Housing associations have different approaches to categorising, auditing and analysing their stock, and the data sets are incredibly varied. The time has come to agree to collect our data on the same basis, using the HACT Data Standards that the sector itself commissioned to tackle this annoying issue. Systematising and tidying our data and everyone sticking to the same rules can seem a thankless and boring task. Sorting out data is like cleaning up your kitchen cupboards – boring, messy and humble work. Doing the work can be tedious. But it won’t sort itself out.

It is not hard to see how having a joined up, aligned methodology for reporting, agreed with the regulator, would make it easier for landlords to understand and comply. For the regulator having all the data open to scrutiny and intrisically comparable between landlords would be a game changer. The ultimate beneficiaries would be tenants who want and need to know more about their home, its attributes, failures and plan. Rather than being required to submit their requests in writing (for goodness sake!) if we had all the information on an online database, they could just browse and find out what they need to know. Being proactive in serving the customer rather than having them ask, wait, challenge, report etc, puts landlords on the front foot for a change. Also, of course, this would help deliver one of the priorities of the Better Social Housing Review.

Are the collective voices of CIH, NHF and the Regulator sufficient to make the concept of a joined up, single format, national database of our homes one of the top priorities for social landlords? If you agree please tell them so!