Capturing better information on tenant satisfaction
Produced for the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR), this report highlights the current diversity in approaches taken across the sector and proposes minimum standards that all social landlords should achieve in order to obtain robust data on tenant satisfaction. In preparing the recommendations, we drew on our extensive track record of conducting research in the social housing sector and studied coordinated approaches in other parts of the UK and in other areas of social policy. We also interviewed a range of key stakeholders in the field, including a number of social landlords, to explore their views of how coordinated approaches could work best. Our overriding principles were to ensure that the SHR obtain robust evidence of tenant satisfaction from all landlords while making sure that the landlords themselves could undertake surveys which are cost effective and do not over burden their time. The main findings from our research are:
- the minimum standard for each social landlord should be to conduct a postal survey of their tenants every two years
- landlords should be allowed flexibility and should be encouraged to adopt more robust methods if that best meets their needs
- there should be a standardised survey, which should be short and cover key indicators. A Question Bank specifying these questions should be established
- the vast majority of landlords should issue a questionnaire to all tenants. Only very large landlords will need to undertake a sampling exercise.
