You said we didn’t.

You were probably right.

When I first heard that one of the government’s responses to the Grenfell Tower Fire and the resulting social housing green paper was going to be tenant satisfaction measures, sometime during 2019, I felt a certain amount of disappointment and cynicism. 2018’s green paper had comprehensively polled tenants and amongst all the other priorities it highlighted was a basic failure of communication by landlords.

In the Green Paper responses, tenants had been clear about what forms this failure had taken, with a mix of responses ranging from simply being ignored to being communicated with inappropriately for a lot of different reasons. They made it clear that they didn’t expect to have all of their requests acted on, but that at the very least if they’d raised an issue they’d expect a response, even if it was to explain why something couldn’t be done.

My reluctance to feel excited about the TSMs was exacerbated because for years housing providers have operated a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs, sorry for the acronyms) and various ‘satisfaction’ measures like ‘STAR surveys’ which tend to elicit a falsely positive view of how landlords are performing.

Turning this reporting requirement from a voluntary to statutory responsibility doesn’t change culture, and it felt and still feels like the TSMs are just an opportunity for housing consultants and membership organisations to make money through widely established ‘training’, conferences and awards, teaching landlords things they know without having to pay for it to be repackaged for them. This whole structure and approach remains very popular in the sector but has been part of the culture that has been failing tenants and made the new regulatory regime necessary.

Five years after my initial disappointment, the social housing sector is due to publish its first full set of Tenant Satisfaction measures by the end June 2024. Some brave landlords have already published their Measures and mentioned it on Twitter (currently known as X). Previous measures used to come out with unbelievable satisfaction of 80 – 90%, usually because surveys were taken just after tenants had had some work completed. Initial showings from the new measures show much lower figures.

Details on the structure and methodology of the new TSMs are long-winded, but worth reading up on for context. I won’t repeat them here – it’s quite boring – but there are 12 new measures that try and capture tenant experiences and ten measures that are recorded directly by landlords based on directly collected data like what percentage of safety checks are complete and how many complaints were dealt with within a landlord’s self-defined timeframes.

What is interesting in the results published so far is the measure called TP09 – “Satisfaction with the landlord’s approach to handling complaints”. It is worth noting that of all the measures, this one is likely to be the one that shows the lowest percentage of satisfaction from tenants. It is likely to remind people who’ve had to raise complaints of the failure that got them to the point of complaining and It will naturally invite responses from tenants who have had a bad service experience that might have been compounded by a bad – or worse – complaints experience.

The image at the top of this blog is a collage of images from the TSMs released so far. They’re from Your Homes Newcastle, Paradigm, bpha, Gravesend Churches HA, Muir Group HA and Wythenshawe Community Housing Group. There might be a stray or two but it was late when I cropped them from the internet. The numbers show a range of satisfaction with complaints from 17.4% to 48% – the point of this isn’t to point fingers at individual landlords, it’s to note how much lower these figures are than measures relied on in the past.

While recognising these figures might be lower than hoped, it’s possible that they don’t even take into account the full range of issues that need to be addressed in complaints handling. While there is a new expectation from the Regulator of Social Housing that improved data will lead to better outcomes, it’s clear that there hasn’t yet been the shift in culture and practice necessary across the whole housing sector to come to terms with *why* complaints handling is such an issue for tenants. We can see that there’s a gap between how many complaints are resolved within agreed timescales – another measure for another day – and how people feel the complaints process has treated them.

Through the establishment of the new remits for the Housing Ombudsman and the Regulator of Social Housing, we can see that complaints, the way they are resolved and the outcomes they produce are a cornerstone of how improvements are expected to be made and tracked. “Learning lessons” is at the core of this strategy, rather than issuing punishments or using powers for direct intervention like replacing Board members. This is admirable but unless the sector truly takes the opportunity to find out why it is falling short of expectations on complaints, the other measures may become necessary.

It bears repeating that during the housing ministerial roadshows after the Grenfell Tower Fire, one of the key issues raised by tenants again and again was about communication. We should expect that tenant experiences might be exaggerated against landlord complaints performance.

We should consider that the TSMs don’t even cover issues where tenants are so put off by interactions with their landlords they don’t want to raise a complaint – or where they have raised complaints but they have not been recorded, let alone acted on.

However this disparity in reporting and reality gets resolved, it needs to be treated as an opportunity for positive change. I commend the landlords who have dared to publish their satisfaction measures before the rush at the end of June 2024, but we need more and urgent public discussion about what the solutions are going to be, and this is a matter of leadership of the type that can deal with uncomfortable truths, not the sort that expects an award for it.