The Government introduced new Consumer Standards for social housing from 1st April 2024 as part of The Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023. These standards are set by the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) and apply to all social landlords, including housing associations like South Lakes Housing and council landlords too.
The new standards provide tenants greater rights and protections and help to improve the quality of social housing, and the service tenants receive overall. There are clear expectations for landlords to follow and you as tenants and residents can see our responsibility and commitment to you.
The four Consumer Standards are:
Safety and Quality Standard
This standard aims to ensure that homes are good quality, safe and well maintained.
Transparency, Influence and Accountability standard
This standard set out that landlords should provide information, listen and act on tenants’ views, be transparent about performance and have clear processes for tenants to raise complaints.
Neighbourhood and Community Standard
This standard promotes partnership working with external agencies in relation to shared spaces, including addressing anti-social behaviour and supporting victims of domestic abuse.
Tenancy Standard
This standard set out how landlords allocate and let homes and manage tenancies. This includes supporting tenants to maintain their tenancy and supporting eligible tenants to carry out a mutual exchange.
For more information about these standards visit Regulatory standards for landlords – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).
It's our responsibility at South Lakes Housing to complete an annual self-assessment to show compliance with the standards and to identify areas where further improvement is required.
As part of the new standards the RSH also introduced a new requirement for all social housing landlords to annually report on a set of measures that tells you how we are doing at providing quality homes and services.
The measures aim to improve standards for people living in social rented housing (known as Low Cost Rented Accommodation (LCRA)) and shared owners (known as Low-Cost Home Ownership (LCHO)) by:
TSMs will show how well we:
You can check out how South Lakes Housing is doing here TSM Customer Satisfaction Survey Results – South Lakes Housing which will be updated when benchmarking information is available.
A new Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code also came into force at the same time, operating on a new statutory footing. The new Code represents a major change and shifts the balance towards responsiveness and accountability. From 1 April 2024 there is a legal duty placed on the Ombudsman to monitor compliance with the Code, regardless of whether it receives individual complaints from residents about a Housing Provider.
Key changes include:
You can find South Lakes Housing’s governing body statement, self-assessment and annual complaints and service improvement report by clicking on the following links.
If you would like to get more involved, the Residents Forum provides feedback and helps us to shape and influence decisions about the services we provide.
Click here to find out more about our Residents Forum.
