Regulator of Social Housing publishes guidance on Tenant Satisfaction Measures

The Regulator of Social Housing has published new guidance on how registered providers need to submit their Tenant Satisfaction Measures results to the regulator.

The regulator introduced Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) on 1 April 2023 as a metric by which to assess how well social landlords in England and Wales are doing at providing quality homes and services.

All providers who own 1,000 or more social housing units are expected to submit a TSM return to the regulator of social housing by 30 June 2024.

Providers with fewer than 1,000 units of social housing are not required to submit a TSM return in June next year, as per the RSH’s current requirements.

However, the regulator has stated that it is conducting a voluntary pilot with small providers to collect data and will evaluate the requirements for 2025 and beyond based on these pilots.

The RSH says that TSM results, which will be made publicly available each year, “are intended to make landlords’ performance more visible to tenants, and help tenants hold their landlords to account”.

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The charter for social housing residents white paper, published in November 2020, outlined the need for a set of tenant satisfaction measures to be published alongside a clear breakdown of how the housing provider’s income is being spent, including levels of executive remuneration.

The regulator of social housing subsequently developed a set of tenant satisfaction measures and standard, which focus on five key themes, including keeping properties in good repair, maintaining building safety, effective complaints handling, respectful and helpful tenant engagement and responsible neighbourhood management. 

There are 22 tenant satisfaction measures in total. These include 10 management information (MI) measures, which landlords need to fill in themselves. The 12 tenant perception measures (TPMs) are based on questions that landlords need to ask tenants.

As well as the TSM results, landlords are required to submit background information on their approach to conducting surveys and provide context for the results, to give assurance that they have met the requirements of the TSM standard.

The Tenant Satisfaction Measure standard sets out the information that the regulator requires social landlords to collect, process and publish information against the tenant satisfaction measures. 

RSH will scrutinise landlords’ performance using the TSM results, along with other regulatory data and its inspection programme.

Will Perry, director of strategy at RSH, said: “Landlords must follow our TSM data return guidance to make sure they submit consistent and transparent TSMs that tenants can use to hold them to account.

“The TSMs are one part of our stronger regulation, which will also include new consumer standards and inspections from next April. We will be ready, and landlords need to make sure they are too.”