Regulator for Socal Housing
The Regulator for all social housing landlords, currently the Tenant Services Authority (TSA) was set up to help improve the services provided to over eight million people. From 1 April 2012 all their key regulatory powers will be transferred over to the Homes and Community Agency.
Changes have been proposed to revise the current Regulatory Framework (see summary below) and bring it in line with all the new legislation changes to the Housing sector, specifically the new Localism Act. Click here
to learn more about these proposed changes and access the link to the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) site for the main consultation document.
Outline of Current Regulatory Framework
Both the TSA and the HCA priorities are to:
- Secure a fair deal for tenants – tenants have limited market power
- Protect public investment - £120 billion invested in social housing
- Deliver modern and effective regulation – improve the quality of life in communities
To meet these priorities the following has been put in place:
- A set of national standards – a framework to monitor performance of landlords. To see those national standards, see our Annual Housing Report 2010-11 published October 2011
- Landlords are required to agree “local standards” with tenants – for tenants to monitor the services being provided
- Housing Inspections – short notices inspections where the landlord is not doing well
- Regulation of RSLs (particularly financial and governance)
And what does this mean for tenants?
- Tailored services based on agreed local standards
- Tenant scrutiny – tenants review regularly their landlords performance against the national and local standards and challenge the landlord when they are not delivering
- Annual report published every October – shows how landlords are performing against the national and local standards
- Building tenant capacity – training and support to better understand the services, what they want from services and how tenants can help shape better services
This new system is called co-regulation - the regulator wants to see tenants get more involved with their housing landlord by looking at the services provided to them, how they meet tenants needs and having a say to improve services.
And as a social housing landlord, we have:
- Annual Report - there are now two published Annual reports, to view click on Annual Report
- Local Standards - on 1 April 2011, after tenant consultation, we launched a set of local standards. To view these, click on Local Standards. We will report how we are doing, click on How well are we doing
- Tenants Performance Scrutiny Group - set up a group of tenants to review our performance of services and our local standards. To view what they have looked at so far, click on Tenant Performance Scrutiny Group.
Getting involved
We have many opportunities for tenants to get involved to suite the need and level of commitment a tenant wants to give.
