Tenant Satisfaction Measures – What Shared Owner residents told us
The Regulator of Social Housing has launched a new set of tenant satisfaction measures for social housing landlords like settle to report on. This is part of new system introduced by the Regulator to assess how well social housing landlords are doing at providing good quality homes and services, and drive improvements where these are needed.
The tenant satisfaction measures cover rented social housing in England. Some, but not all, of the tenant satisfaction measures also cover shared ownership homes.
Landlords with 1,000 or more homes were required to submit their first year of tenant satisfaction measures data to the Regulator by the end of June 2024, for the year from 1 April 2023 – 31 March 2024. We submitted data for the homes we are required to report on at the end of June which you can view on our Tenant Satisfaction Measures page.
We are not required to report tenant satisfaction data for shared ownership properties, as we have less than 1,000 of these homes at settle. We are fully committed to the intentions behind the surveys – to ensure we are listening to residents and learning from what we are hearing to drive improvements. We have therefore carried out these surveys with residents and included an update below.
Shared Owners
Our research partner, Acuity Research and Practice, carried out the survey with settle residents earlier this year. They gathered 134 responses, representing 20% of shared owner residents at settle and we have posted these results our website – Tenant Satisfaction Measures- Shared Owners.
Summary
Taking everything into account, when it comes to overall satisfaction, 62% of shared owner residents said that they were satisfied, 20% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied and 18% of respondents said they were dissatisfied.
79% of residents told us they felt safe in their homes. Residents were asked if they were satisfied with the overall quality of their home, and almost three quarters (74%) said they were satisfied, 15% were neither satisfied or dissatisfied and 11% were dissatisfied with the quality of their home.
We can see that the areas of highest dissatisfaction for shared owners are very similar to those we see for other residents at settle:
- Satisfaction with communal areas being clean and well maintained.
- How we handle complaints.
- How we listen and act.
- Our approach to handling anti-social behaviour.
We have plans in place to improve our work in each of these areas.
Communal areas
42% of shared owner residents who responded were dissatisfied that communal areas are clean and well maintained, making it one of the highest areas of dissatisfaction in the survey. 47% of residents were satisfied and 11% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.
Some of the improvements we have introduced recently in response to resident feedback include:
- More frequent and regular post-inspections to ensure quality of work in our communal spaces and green areas. We are planning to carry out random quality checks and use these outcomes to review and help influence and shape our services going forward.
- Agreeing a new window cleaning contractor which we aim to be in place by the end of the summer 2024.
- Identifying where we can make improvements to our overall soft landscape features with things like additional planting and cleaning of pathways.
- Throughout the year (March 2023 to April 2024), we also carried out neighbourhood action days where dissatisfaction around the quality of the neighbourhood and communal spaces was lowest to help us to understand how residents feel and what we could do to make improvements.
How we handle complaints
Throughout last year, we continued to work hard to ensure we respond to complaints quickly, putting things right and learning from when things have gone wrong. We have seen strong ongoing performance with 98% of all complaints responded to within the Housing Ombudsman timeframes.
Only 33% of shared owner residents surveyed said they were satisfied with our approach to handling complaints.
Dissatisfaction may be due to some residents answering this question based on their experience, perhaps reporting a service request, a complaint about anti-social behaviour or something that is happening in their neighbourhood, without having raised this as a formal complaint to us.
We are committed to improving our complaint handling processes to ensure residents know their rights and what to expect from us when things go wrong. We will always:
- Call residents in the first instance or contact them by their preferred method of contact to ensure we fully understand their complaint and the outcome they are hoping for.
- Let residents know how long it is likely to take and any next steps.
- Provide residents with a point of contact for any questions they may have.
We will also continue to improve how we handle complaints. This year we have set all colleagues at settle an objective focused on the areas we know are important to residents: improving communication, responding to complaints promptly and learning from when things have gone wrong.
Listens and acts
35% of residents who responded said they were dissatisfied with how we listen and act. The areas where residents would like to see improvements include quicker response times to carry out communal repairs and resolve issues, and around communication and information. Some residents said that they usually felt that we listen to their concerns, but we fail to address them appropriately. 41% of residents were satisfied with how we listen and act while 23% didn’t feel strongly either way.
We set up our Listen and Act group in July 2023 for colleagues to come together regularly to review feedback we get from residents including that from tenant satisfaction measures. Each quarter colleagues look into a topic to discuss ways that we can make improvements, for example, we recently looked at how we could increase resident satisfaction around communal spaces.
Anti-social behaviour
When it comes to our approach to handling anti-social behaviour, 37% of residents were satisfied. 44% were neither satisfied or dissatisfied, while 19% said they were dissatisfied.
Some of the actions we are taking to ensure residents feel safe and comfortable in their homes and surrounding community include:
- Delivering community safety events in emerging “hot spot” areas of ASB and utilising data and local knowledge to provide information, advice and reassurance to residents that is supported by partner agencies.
- Delivering regular training that supports improved case management approaches and refreshes legal understanding.
- Providing information about services available from statutory and other agencies. This includes referring matters to the Police when it is a criminal act as settle do not have legal powers to investigate crime.
