Strong tenant voices are vital in scrutinising performance

So, an empowered tenant and, for the landlord, a satisfied tenant. This is exactly the kind of engagement between tenants and landlords we promote.

We empower tenants and residents like Carol in a number of ways.

First, by providing them with good information on the performance of their landlord. Our charter reporting tools are popular with tenants and others. These help tenants to better understand their landlord’s performance and to compare this with the performance of other landlords. Like Carol, other tenants tell us our reports are a useful and simple way to find out how their landlord is doing when it comes to the things that matter most.

“We expect landlords to engage their tenants when planning and developing services and in scrutinising their performance.”

Second, we promote a strong tenant voice. We expect landlords to engage their tenants when planning and developing services and in scrutinising their performance. Landlords should make it easy for tenants to raise concerns with them.

We work with our national panel of 500 tenants and service users, our tenant advisors and the network of registered tenant organisations to keep us focused on what tenants and service users tell us is important to them.

Thirdly, we give tenants a way to bring to us significant performance failures by their landlord. A significant performance failure is something that a landlord does, or fails to do, that puts the interests of its tenants at risk. This could be failure to meet safety requirements, such as annual gas safety checks. This is an important safeguard for tenants.

We published our national report on the Scottish Social Housing Charter last month. This shows social landlords have improved or maintained their performance across almost all of the Scottish Social Housing Charter outcomes and standards.

Tenant satisfaction remains high, with nine out of 10 satisfied with the overall service their landlord provides. Of course, there are some landlords who perform less well and we will continue to look to those landlords to improve. But, overall, this is a strong performance from landlords.

We’ve started a comprehensive review of our regulatory framework, as we committed to do when we launched the current framework in 2012. Through our review we’ll build on our approach to empowering tenants and we will continue to give tenants a voice.

“An early emerging theme in our review of the regulatory framework is an even stronger emphasis on tenant safety in social housing.”

It is important we focus our finite resources on the most critical issues, especially those with the potential for most harm to the interests of tenants and service users. An early emerging theme in our review of the regulatory framework is an even stronger emphasis on tenant safety in social housing. Landlords’ generally good performance in delivering housing management services may mean we can focus more on tenant and resident safety. Clearly, the tragedy of Grenfell Tower gives this added significance.

Landlords need to understand and meet all of their responsibilities to keep tenants and residents safe. We also want landlords to support effective ways for tenants to have their voices heard. We will continue to look to landlords to assure us that they are doing all of this. Through our review we will explore what more we can do in these areas.

We’ll be asking our stakeholders over the coming months for their views on the future priorities for the regulatory framework. Empowering tenants, tenant and resident safety, and tenants’ voices will all be prominent in those conversations.

Michael Cameron, chief executive, Scottish Housing Regulator