New consumer standards will help landlords improve homes and services | Tenant news

This month sees a new set of consumer standards, and an accompanying Code of Practice come into force, monitored by The Regulator of Social Housing (RSH).

All registered social housing providers, including Habinteg, are expected to meet the four new standards which we first told you about last September. They are:

• The Neighbourhood and Community Standard – this outlines how landlords should engage with relevant parties to ensure tenants live in secure, well-maintained neighbourhoods and feel safe in their homes.
   
• The Safety and Quality Homes Standard – this focuses on ensuring that landlords understand the condition of all their homes and make use of that information to provide safe, quality homes that meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.
   
• The Tenancy Standard – this aims to ensure homes are allocated and let fairly and sets out how tenancies should be managed and ended by landlords.
   
• The Transparency, Influence and Accountability standard (including the Tenant Satisfaction Measures introduced in April 2023) – this requires landlords to be open with tenants and treat them fairly and with respect so that tenants can access services, raise complaints and influence the decisions made by their landlord.
   

Tenant Satisfaction Measures

The Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) are a list of measures social landlords in England and Wales must report on, so tenants can see how well they are doing at providing quality homes and services.

All social landlords are required to submit their first set of Tenant Satisfaction Measures to the RSH by 30 June 2024.

Habinteg’s Tenant Satisfaction Measures will be published in the tenant area of our website soon. They will also appear in our 2024 Annual Report to Tenants and the 2024 summer edition of our Update newsletter.

Code of Practice

The new Code of Practice that accompanies the new consumer standards will help tenants and landlords understand what’s expected of them.

It provides more details on the content of the standards with examples the regulator thinks are useful. It aims to help registered providers understand how they might deliver the expected outcomes of the standards.