Target practice

It’s quality as well as appearance that counts – so whether you get a full Audit Commission service inspection or one at short notice, your organisation should already be on target.

Organisations have so far been focused on the Audit Commission’s key lines of enquiry (KLOE) during inspection. In addition, the Tenant Services Authority last month published its statutory consultation, setting out six new standards which emphasise the relationship between landlords and their tenants at local level. From 1 April 2010, inspection will be a TSA power, says Andrew Dench, TSA assistant director for choice.

Although the KLOEs are being reviewed, their final form will not swerve too much from the basic principles of good housing, he says. Certainly for the time being, KLOEs provide useful guidance.

So we take a look at the key messages from recent inspections and come up with five top targets to get the perfect result.

‘What landlords should be doing is delivering really good services for their tenants,’ says Mr Dench. ‘If you, as a landlord, are organising your business so it’s tenant-focused and meeting tenants’ needs and specific standards, then an inspector can come in at any point, and you’ll get an excellent rating.’

The Audit Commission’s Roy Irwin, director of housing, sustainability and economic development, says organisations should continue to ‘look at their strengths and weaknesses. 

Instil quality in all that you do

Jim Wilson, now managing consultant at Tribal, was an Audit Commission inspector for two years. ‘You need to always be focused on service enquiry,’ he says. ‘Using the key lines of enquiry is a very good foundation stone for achieving excellence but there’s no point doing it as a one-off exercise. It should be part of your culture… Inspectors are very used to smelling fresh paint,’ he says.

‘Just run your business well,’ says Mr Irwin. ‘If you’re not running the business well, then inspection just takes a photograph of you messing around.’ 

Show value for money

‘Be clear on what your service costs are and the performance you’re getting out of the organisation for that cost,’ says Mr Wilson. Using benchmarking organisations such as Housemark will enable organisations to assess whether its service cost is above or below the average, he says. Mr Irwin suggests organisations start assessment in very simple ways: ‘Look at your accountancy and think, “which external supplier do we spend most of our money on?” Then look at how good that supplier is against what you’re spending.’

The same benchmarking process can be applied internally, says Mr Irwin, looking at where most staff time is spent: ‘You can do that by tasks or location. Is our time spent evenly or in certain places and is that because the demand is legitimately there or are we less efficient there and less fleet of foot in dealing with issues?’

Be hot on diversity

‘The Audit Commission is expecting organisations to have very accurate profile data as to who their tenants are,’ says Mr Wilson. This includes family make-up as well as BME background and faith. But housing organisations often let this run out of date. ‘Organisations have been quite poor about storing that information and mining that information,’ says Mr Wilson, adding that inspectors want to see how it is used proactively.

Mr Irwin agrees that organisations hold a great deal of information on their customers, but that, ‘the application of that data for the benefit of the relationship between the landlord and the tenant is not that high’.

‘It’s interesting when people get to the age of 100 they get a birthday card from the Queen. How many housing providers actually know which of their tenants are 100?’ he asks.

In practical terms, Mr Wilson says, ‘there is a great deal of potential’ in the data held on tenants. He suggests that organisations can produce translated documents by assessing the number of people for whom English is not a first language. Other suggestions are analysing family data to offer repairs appointments to single parents outside of school-run time. 

Push customer access and service

Learn from complaints. Mr Irwin says service requests are often reworks. ‘How many times across all your services is your second conversation logged as a repeat of the first conversation? That’s where there’s waste in the system.’

Also, look at the complaints content – is it a unique complaint?’ he asks. ‘Or could it just be the telephone manner of a particular officer or the manner and attitude of the call centre? Most complaints are quite reasonably put and maybe [the complainants] feel ignored. It’s about customer satisfaction and treating people with respect.’ Mr Irwin says it can annoy tenants when information they’ve given is not recorded and they have to keep repeating it.

Foster a good relationship with your inspector

Mr Wilson compares inspection as being similar to a dental visit: ‘You’re not going to look forward to it but it should bring benefits in the long term if you go.’ He says there’s no point in tiffs with the inspector. ‘The inspectors hold all the aces here in this game so if you try to put up resistance it’s going to be more painful, more difficult and you’re very unlikely to win. If you start to be awkward, you’ll just wind them up.’

‘Always be honest,’ advises Mr Wilson, who explains that housing association officers in one-to-one interviews may feel they should know everything they are asked about. ‘If you don’t know the answer, just say you don’t know.’ Instead, direct them to the best person. ‘The problem with blagging it is that if [the truth emerges], then everything you said to the inspector can be discredited.’

But Mr Irwin says that how the inspector is treated holds no sway on the final inspection result. ‘We’ve had people smothering us with chocolate biscuits and it doesn’t make any difference. What really matters is the relationship they have with their customers.’ However, he concedes that the way the organisation treats its inspectors gives an indication of how it treats its customers.

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