The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) Consumer Standards are new rules for UK social landlords, effective April 2024. These aim to make sure you have a safe, secure, and well-maintained home, with clear communication and a good service from your landlord.
- Neighbourhood and Community Standard: Focuses on safe, well-maintained neighbourhoods and working with others.
- Safety and Quality Standard: Ensures homes are safe, decent, well-maintained, with effective repairs and adaptations.
- Tenancy Standard: Covers fair allocation, clear tenancy management, and ending tenancies fairly.
- Transparency, Influence and Accountability (including Tenant Satisfaction Measures): Mandates landlords be open, treat tenants with respect, allow influence, and provide performance data.
The (RSH) issues consumer gradings (C1-C4) following inspections, with C1 indicating compliance and C4 indicating serious failures:
- C1 (Highest): Compliant, meets outcomes, identifies and fixes issues.
- C2: Some weaknesses requiring improvement.
- C3: Serious weaknesses requiring significant improvement.
- C4 (Lowest): Very serious failures requiring urgent, fundamental changes.
These standards arose from the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023 and apply to local authorities and private registered providers of social housing. The RSH regulates these standards with a focus on the outcomes for tenants, using a risk-based approach.
These standards align with our objective to manage our business to the highest standards through investing in our homes, getting really good at customer service, and creating thriving communities.
How are we meeting the consumer standards?
We’re investing in our homes to meet high safety and quality standards. In the last year, we’ve invested £100 million invested into existing homes, including £5 million in building and fire safety provision, £4 million to make homes more energy efficient, and £1 million in tackling the root causes of damp and mould.
We work with partners to tackle anti-social behaviour and provide tailored local support. We’ve created a new policy and procedure which sets out how we manage our neighbourhoods and communal spaces to offer consistency and a high standard across all of our communities. In the last year we launched our regional model to keep us rooted in our communities. We’re using local customer feedback, data and research to set our priorities for each region, and reducing the patch sizes our housing colleagues are responsible for giving them smaller areas to manage mean colleagues can spend more time in communities and connecting with you.
Our customers are at the heart of everything we do, so who better to tell us how we can improve? We listen to you and your feedback to make sure we’re delivering great services. There are different ways you can have your say, from responding to one-off surveys to opportunities like joining our Resident Scrutiny Panel and our regional customer panels.
We’re dedicated to creating quality, sustainable communities where our customers can thrive. In the last year, we’ve invested more than £90,000 into local communities through our Community Funding Panel, ranging from local foodbanks to summer events for children, and community garden space to food-based initiatives.
As your landlord, we’re committed to improving our services in line with these consumer standards. We will prioritise your homes and safety, treat you with fairness and respect, and deliver great customer service, to meet our aim of creating thriving communities.
We’ll keep you updated on our progress and report on the Tenant Satisfaction Measures to show how we’re performing.
Find out more about the tenant satisfaction measures and read our latest reports
