Endangered species?

The Tenant Services Authority’s first birthday celebrations are likely to have been a little odd. As staff cut the cake and hung up the balloons on 1 December, they should have been savouring the moment. But though the TSA has made great progress in changing regulation, its future is far from secure. In fact, listening to the Conservatives, its survival prospects seem only slightly better than the dodo’s.

As the regulator’s confidence has grown, so has the the Conservative party’s rhetoric on making it extinct. Such is the fear that the Tories will scrap the TSA that industry bodies have started a rearguard action to save it, dubbed Operation Pink after the agency’s eye-catching brand colour.

It wasn’t always thus. Last November, shadow housing minister Grant Shapps told Inside Housing he was less concerned about the TSA than he was about the Homes and Communities Agency (Inside Housing, 28 November 2008).

This month, Inside Housing learnt that the Tories were considering handing local authorities power to regulate housing associations. Mr Shapps denies any concrete plans, but adds: ‘[The TSA] are expensive: they cost £38 million to establish. I think they are being quite top-level down and they have spent their money predominantly on glossy marketing material.

‘Someone gave me a TSA-branded plastic bag at an event recently. When I asked a parliamentary question about the cost – it came to £3,000.’

The Conservatives are ‘absolutely committed’ to giving tenants more power over the way landlords manage their homes, he says. ‘But what I am not convinced about is that the way to make tenants more powerful is to actually take power away from them and put it in the hands of a national quango.’

Graham Brown, group business director at Isos Housing, thinks the Tories may simply be posturing to gain public support. However, he is not convinced that scrapping the TSA will prove a winner with many voters. ‘I think they will find it is not worth doing,’ he says. ‘I don’t think the public will support them because most people do not understand social housing regulation anyway.’

Key to the TSA’s fight for survival will be the achievements of the past year. So what are they?

Most important is the change in emphasis that puts tenants at the centre of regulation.

Keith Helm, chair of the tenants’ executive panel at Coast & Country Housing Association, is pleased with the TSA’s progress and struggles to think of any criticism at all. ‘Their regulatory framework document is a bit long,’ he says eventually. ‘But it has made a heck of a lot of difference. With the TSA we had a chance to actually speak to Peter Marsh. And he actually listened to us and considered what we had to say.’

This new emphasis on tenants has not always been popular with social landlords, some of whom have objected to the amount of time the TSA has spent speaking with tenants. But most landlords say they are happy with the new regulator, even if this is partly out of fear they could lose it so soon.

John Bryant, policy leader at the National Housing Federation, says housing associations are ‘broadly happy’ with the TSA’s progress over the past year, especially given the climate in which it launched: ‘They had to deal with the worst single crisis affecting a housing association, which was Ujima. It was a huge ask for the TSA over the Christmas period when everyone was away, with a real risk of a financial default in the sector. And the TSA measured up to that.

‘I can understand why they felt that they needed to go through such a long consultation process, but with the benefit of hindsight some of that time could have been better used, but we have still arrived at what is on balance a positive position.’

TSA chief executive Peter Marsh argues the lengthy consultation process was necessary for the regulator to publish a full regulatory framework.

‘We are required to consult in quite a complex way,’ he says. ‘I could have sat down and issued a statutory consultation document for the housing associations back in April. But we wanted to make sure that we were sending out a document for both housing associations and local authorities.’

On his own performance, Mr Marsh is philosophical. When he started, a number of comments he made put a some landlords’ noses out of joint. But he makes no apology. ‘Some of the comments that I made at the start did raise a few eyebrows,’ he says. ‘I think the difficulty here is that three or four words taken from a half hour speech can always sound more dramatic than originally intended.

‘There was one comment that I made saying the TSA would come down like a ton of bricks on chief executives who let tenant satisfaction levels slip. That attracted a lot of attention, but our ton of bricks is still firmly ready to be deployed if necessary. Not for every landlord, but for those who require it’.

The TSA has only just got started – it would be a shame, say many in the sector, if it faced extinction before it has a chance to prove itself.

But Mr Marsh is staying optimistic: ‘Once Grant Shapps takes a long hard look at the benefits regulation brings, I am confident that these benefits will persuade him to keep us.’

Have your say

You must sign in to make a comment