ARK Directors Paul O'Callaghan and Nick Sedgwick on the Tenancy Standard

The RSH Tenancy Standard

By Paul O’Callaghan · 23 May 2024

We’re excited to share a series of insightful conversations on the new Regulator of Social Housing Consumer Standards, which came into effect on 1 April 2024. In these discussions, ARK Assistant Director Paul O’Callaghan sat down with Nick Sedgwick and Helen Scurr to delve into the key changes and implications for housing providers within the sector. In this conversation, Paul and Helen focus on the Tenancy Standard, discussing the importance of understanding communities, the needs of your tenants, and having good quality data and knowing what to do with it.

You can watch the video of their conversation below or scroll down to read the full transcript.

Our video on the Safety & Quality Standard can be viewed here.
Our video on the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard can be viewed here.
Our video on the Neighbourhood & Community Standard can be viewed here.

Transcript:

Paul O’Callaghan: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our bite conversations, where we focus on the hot topics in the housing sector. Today we’ll be talking about the new consumer standards, which launched on the 1st of April this year. I’m pleased to be joined today by Nick Sedgwick. He’s one of our associate directors and one of our regulatory experts in the business as well.

Nick, how are you?

 

Nick Sedgwick: I’m good, thank you. I’m not used to having these bright lights shining at me, but we’ll get used to it.

 

Paul: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s wonderful to have you here. Obviously, a really big year for the housing sector with the launch of the new consumer standards and the new regulatory approach as well. What are your thoughts on what that means for the sector in general?

 

Nick: Well, the sector has known this has been coming and hopefully the sector has been preparing for it, but it will mean a period when the sector is going to be under the microscope a bit more, especially with the regulator wanting to start inspecting people and see how they’re doing against the new consumer standards. But it will be good for the sector.

Hopefully, there are some really good performers out there. But where people do need to improve, it will give them the opportunity to do that.

 

Paul: And what do you think some of the benefits are? Obviously, there’s the raising of the standards and driving performance. But in terms of the broader positives that will come out of this?

 

Nick: Well, one of the big positives must be the greater encouragement of engagement with tenants and residents. If you listen to your residents, they are going to give you a clear idea of their expectations for the service that they want to see. And if organisations really listen to them, that will help to drive up standards.

 

Paul: Wonderful. Thank you, Nick. Obviously, we’re here to talk about each of the individual consumer standards, and we won’t do all four at once because there’s far too much to cover in a bite-sized session. So what we really want to focus on here is the tenancy standard. What do you think organisations need to pay particular attention to in regards to the tenancy standard?

 

Nick: Well, very quickly, the standard covers how people find their way into your homes, how you allocate or let your homes, how you manage those homes, especially with a focus on tenancy sustainment, how you help people to stay in their homes. And then it covers other issues, things like supporting mutual exchanges, and tackling under-occupation and overcrowding.

So just thinking about how people, but the regulator really, oh, well, the standards are looking for people to set their own outcomes that they expect from their services and for those organisations, for their boards, the councillors, and the executive teams to understand how they’re performing against those outcomes they’ve set for themselves.

So, for example, in terms of the way you let your homes, are you clear on who you want to let your homes to? Do you understand the communities that you operate in, the needs of those communities, and the needs of your existing tenants as well? And are you achieving those outcomes? Are you letting to the people you want to let to through both your policies, your procedures, but also the way that you bring in referrals for people to live with you?

So that’s just one example. Do you understand those issues? And then in terms of things like tenancy sustainment, I’m sure we all want people to succeed in their homes, to improve their quality of life through living in a good home with their landlord. But we want those tenancies to be maintained.

And what can you do as a landlord to support people to do that? That’s really good for the residents, obviously. But it makes an awful lot of good business sense. If you keep people in the homes that they like, then that is going to reduce your costs, reduce the turnover, etcetera. And that makes good business sense as well.

 

Paul: There’s a couple of things that you touched on there just to draw out a little bit more. And one of them is a theme that I found runs through each of the standards, which is around the importance of data. And you’ve mentioned that around kind of knowing your customers, but particularly in relation to this standard, there’s knowing your potential customers as well. How important do you think that sort of data is in terms of performing against the standards that have been set out?

 

Nick: It’s key. Organisations hold an awful lot of data themselves about their existing residents, and that will give you a good guide. But there’s an awful lot of data that you can also draw from national statistics and local statistics to make sure you understand the makeup of the communities that you serve.

But also, you can also work with your partners. So part of the standard is to cooperate with the local authorities to tackle the housing needs within the area, especially tackling things like homelessness. And at the moment, we’ve got record levels of temporary accommodation. So there will be an expectation that landlords will be working with their local authorities to understand the reasons for homelessness, the types of people who are homeless, and to think about how you can help to house people who are homeless, but then also support them to maintain those tenancies.

 

Paul: Actually, the second thing I was going to mention was around the importance of partnerships and linking up between housing associations, local authorities, and private sector landlords as well. And what became really apparent to me, and it’s only something that’s just come back, is, of course, your past experience and how you linked in with homelessness. Do you want to just say a little bit more about what that experience looked like?

 

Nick: Well, at one stage, I was seconded to what was called the Homelessness Action Team. So it was a national adviser on homelessness, working with local authorities and housing associations to encourage them to tackle homelessness in temporary accommodation especially.

So I suppose for me, that’s why it’s so disappointing that we have such levels of temporary accommodation now. But at that time, it was all about partnership working. Obviously, you can look at an organisation’s own policies and procedures and the way they work and avoid evicting people, etc. But really more importantly, it was building those partnerships.

So wherever you are, there’s always a wide range of other services that you can tap into and refer tenants to get support for their specific needs. I think often landlords think they need to do it all themselves, but it can be much more effective to work with your partners and build those relationships.

 

Paul: Wonderful. So, one of the things that’s really struck me since I started with ARK earlier this year is the volume of people that are at ARK, but more importantly, their expertise and knowledge, their skills, and the depth of capacity that we have.

How would you say some of the most important things, and some of the ways in which ARK could support the sector in becoming compliant with these standards? But more importantly, how do we facilitate them going beyond compliance? How can we help them to do that?

 

Nick: Yeah, so we already have experience of working with some landlords who wanted to assess themselves against the new standards. And I think what we’ve learned from that is that you can go through an exercise and tell people, point out to people where they may need to improve against the standard. But the important thing is understanding maybe why they need to improve.

So it may be a range of issues. It may be that the decision-making, the governance needs to improve in a certain area. It may be that they’re struggling to attract and retain and develop the right staff to be able to deliver a certain service. Or it might be that partnership working that we’ve just discussed as well. So what we aim to do at ARK is to help people to understand the why as well.

And then, yes, we have a wide range of directly employed staff within ARK, but also a range of associates who are real specialists in their area who can then work with landlords to tackle those areas where they do need to improve.

Paul: And of course, some of your relatively recent experience and your past experience has been in this exact area, hasn’t it, in terms of helping those organisations improve their governance, improve their assurance, and look at how compliant they are with the regulatory framework? Is there anything you can tell us a little bit more about some of the work that you’ve done in that space?

Nick: I think for some organisations it’s often about being a critical friend. They have the capacity to do it and often have the skills, but it is somebody who just keeps on asking those questions like, why are you doing that? Are you going far enough? Can you prove what you’re doing? Because at the end of the day, when we do come to inspections, it is going to be around the evidence.

So somebody that can actually say, are you doing enough? And maybe where there’s the odd gap, we can draw on ARK’s experience to plug those gaps and help landlords to be ready for inspections when they come.

 

Paul: Thank you for your time discussing the tenancy standard. Really, really useful conversation and excellent points made. Thank you to everybody for watching the video. If you’d like to find out more about how ARK can support you in becoming compliant with the new consumer standards, particularly the tenancy standard, as we’ve just discussed, please feel free to get in contact with us. And thank you very much for tuning in.

 

Here at ARK, we can help you to meet or exceed the new RSH Consumer Standards. If you would like more information, simply get in touch.

Paul O’Callaghan, Assistant Director – pocallaghan@arkconsultancy.co.uk

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