The scores are in and they are…okay. The Regulator of Social Housing expects the first year of tenant satisfaction measures to provide a ‘line in the sand’ for landlords to improve their performance, so what lessons have been learned ahead of the 2025 surveys? Neil Merrick investigates.
For the past year or so, thousands of tenants have been revealing how much satisfaction they get from the homes and services provided by their landlord.
The first official results from the tenant satisfaction measures (TSMs) showed about 70% of tenants feel generally positive about living in social housing. Shared owners are less content (with many believing their opinions are ignored), while the way landlords handle complaints was criticised across the board.
But what did the sector as a whole learn from the results for 2023/24, unveiled by the Register of Social Housing (RSH) in late November?
For Kate Dodsworth, chief of regulatory engagement at the RSH, the first scores represent a significant milestone that should give landlords and tenants a clearer picture of what’s going well, and where things could be better.
“It’s the first time we’ve had a consistent set of performance indicators that allows comparison between social landlords across England. It’s a really useful tool for tenants to scrutinise their landlord’s performance, while landlords will want to look under the bonnet and see where they can improve”
Kate Dodsworth, chief of regulatory engagement, Regulator of Social Housing
More than half a million tenants were consulted by housing associations and local authorities, while a separate national tenants survey by the RSH gathered opinions from more than 3,000 tenants and nearly 400 shared owners.
“It’s the first time we’ve had a consistent set of performance indicators that allows comparison between social landlords across England,” she says. “It’s a really useful tool for tenants to scrutinise their landlord’s performance, while landlords will want to look under the bonnet and see where they can improve.”
In simple terms, 71% of tenants and 49.5% of shared owners are satisfied with their landlord. However, just 34.5% of tenants and 19% of shared owners who made a complaint during the previous 12 months were happy with how it was handled.
Complaint handling dissatisfaction
Dissatisfaction with complaint handling won’t come as much of a shock, given the attention it receives from the Housing Ombudsman. But do the findings necessarily reflect the true picture?
According to the TSMs, just 28% of residents at Stonewater Homes were satisfied with the way their complaints were handled in 2023/24. The association owns nearly 35,000 homes across England and interviewed about 10% of tenants and shared owners using a market research company.
Dave Lockerman, director of housing operations, says Stonewater’s internal data reveals a discrepancy between the number of tenants who told the market research company they had made a complaint, and the far lower number of formal complaints received by the association.
The high number of complaints shown up in the TSMs suggests tenants might be confusing complaints with service requests. “It’s still important, as it’s about how we handle customer contact more widely, but it’s also important that customers are clear about the distinction, and about what is a service request,” says Lockerman.
Soha Housing noticed a similar discrepancy. The association interviewed 1,200 of its 8,000 tenants, with 42% stating they were satisfied with complaint handling – well above the national average.
Where the TSM survey showed a tenant was unhappy over complaints, Soha staff followed it up by contacting the tenant directly. Chief executive Kate Wareing also believes tenants were sometimes referring to a service request, not a complaint.
“Most people who said they were unhappy with complaint handling hadn’t registered a complaint,” says Wareing. “The complaints metric isn’t measuring what you think it is. It’s a bit of a blunt tool.”
According to the RSH’s national tenants survey, which accompanied the first year’s TSMs, approximately one fifth of complaints referred to by tenants can be classed as complaints under the ombudsman’s complaint handling code, while the remainder are either ambiguous or most likely service requests.
A line in the sand
Kate Dodsworth accepts TSM scores don’t reveal granular detail and recommends social landlords triangulate their scores against other information. Overall results have, however, drawn a line in the sand, allowing landlords to find ways of moving their scores upwards from this year onwards.
Soha did this by adding its own questions to those required by the regulator. One of these asked people about their financial circumstances and revealed how tenants with financial concerns were more likely to mark the association down when they responded to TSM questions.
Just 29% of tenants who were very concerned about the cost of living said they were satisfied with the quality of communal areas, compared with 73% of tenants who were slightly concerned about the cost of living. Tenants with greater financial concerns were also less likely to be satisfied with Soha’s approach to antisocial behaviour.
This year, Soha cut the number of supplementary questions, mainly to reduce what Kate Wareing describes as “survey fatigue”. However, the association regards follow-ups as crucial to deriving greater insight from TSM results.
After the TSM survey found female tenants were more likely to be dissatisfied with repairs, Soha arranged follow-up calls. This showed that women’s dissatisfaction wasn’t due to faulty workmanship or even punctuality, but because they found the contractors patronising.
Back at Stonewater, Dave Lockerman admits levels of satisfaction aren’t as high as the association would like. Its 2024/25 scores show signs of improvement, not least in Somerset, where Stonewater introduced a new housing management model with antisocial behaviour, neighbourhood and tenancy specialists working as a single county team.
The advantage, says Lockerman, is that team members work collectively to resolve issues, keeping tenants updated over what’s happening. “TSMs were one of the triggers alongside other feedback and insight, such as customer complaints and transactional surveys,” he adds.
“Most people who said they were unhappy with complaint handling hadn’t registered a complaint. The complaints metric isn’t measuring what you think it is. It’s a bit of a blunt tool”
Kate Wareing, chief executive, Soha Housing
Stonewater is also talking to other associations about their experience of TSMs and ways to improve services. “We’re reaching out to those that are performing better,” he adds.
Helen McHale, chief executive of Stockport Homes, has spoken to landlords across Greater Manchester about the arm’s length management organisation’s results [see below], and issues arising from the scores, such as dealing with antisocial behaviour.
On complaints, McHale points out that tenants are being actively encouraged by the ombudsman to complain to their landlord when they are unhappy. “There’s a way to go before we and the sector get on top of this,” she adds.
Early government plans for TSM league tables were quickly dropped but, according to the RSH, it’s reasonable to compare landlords’ results if they collect data using the same method.
Social landlords have always been keen to benchmark performance data, says Kate Dodsworth, mainly to raise standards. She also expects tenants to closely scrutinise their landlord’s scores. “There will be some interesting conversations going on about how they can make improvements.”
What happens next?
Landlords have known their 2023/24 scores for more than six months, though they couldn’t compare them with other landlords’ until two months ago.
When it comes to consumer inspections, which got underway last April, TSMs are just one source of information for regulators, says Dodsworth. If TSM scores flag up immediate concerns, such as health and safety, the RSH won’t hesitate to get in touch with a landlord.
Alistair Smyth, director of policy and research at the National Housing Federation, acknowledges there’s room for improvement where tenant satisfaction is low, such as complaint handling. “TSMs are a useful tool to help landlords better understand how their residents experience the services they provide,” he says.
“Tenants like the fact we go to visit them. We’re trying to build a relationship with the customer in a way that a market research company isn’t”
Helen McHale, chief executive, Stockport Homes
For Caritas Charles, senior policy, insight and innovation manager at TPAS, the next stage is for landlords to use their results to bring about cultural change, possibly in the relationship between managers and tenants.
“It will be interesting to dive in deeper and see what people’s perception of good is,” says Charles. “A high level of complaints doesn’t necessarily mean a bad complaints culture. We would encourage the sector to make the data as widely available as possible and look behind the headline figures.”
All of which means the informal conversations taking place among landlords, and the follow-up questions posed by associations such as Soha are, at this stage, probably the most valuable thing to come out of the first year’s results. “The TSMs are a flag,” says Kate Wareing. “It’s a missed opportunity if you don’t take it.”
Look into my eyes – why face-to-face interviews work best
One of the best ways to gain higher tenant satisfaction scores is to look into people’s eyes when asking their opinions.
Across England, the first year’s TSM scores show face-to-face interviews gave an average satisfaction rate of 75%, compared with 70% for telephone surveys and 58% for surveys via the internet.
Stockport Homes continued to interview tenants face-to-face in the same way as it did for internal customer surveys prior to TSMs. This led to the arm’s length management organisation achieving the second best results of any social landlord, with 91% overall satisfaction and 61% satisfaction for complaint handling.
Chief executive Helen McHale believes the way the data was collected, with staff visiting residents at home, may have inflated its scores by up to 20%. “Tenants like the fact we go to visit them,” she adds. “We’re trying to build a relationship with the customer in a way that a market research company isn’t.”
Higher scores stemming from face-to-face interviews (or even a telephone survey) are in line with findings from opinion pollsters such as Gallup. These suggest people tend to give more positive responses when questions are read to them by a person than when the same questions are self-administered (such as online).
About two thirds of social landlords used telephone surveys as their main way of collecting TSM scores, but it wasn’t uncommon for landlords to use more than one method. According to Kate Dodsworth, the most important thing is that landlords are transparent about the method used.
Landlords continue to have discretion over which method they use in 2024/25, with the regulator not planning changes on this or other aspects of TSMs. “The important thing is that we look at results after a few years and resist any temptation to step in and change things at this stage,” Dodsworth adds.
TSMs – the key takeaways
Here are our key takeaways from the first year of tenant satisfaction measures and national tenant survey:
- Repairs are the main concern of most tenants
- Complaint handling is seen as poor across the sector
- Housing association tenants are marginally more satisfied (73%) with their home and landlord services than council tenants (68%)
- Face-to-face interviews lead to the highest satisfaction scores though most landlords (65%) used a telephone survey
- Older tenants are happier than younger ones
- Levels of satisfaction are lower in London than the rest of England.
TSMs and the relevance of age, disability, gender and ethnicity
Age appears to be a determining factor when it comes to tenant satisfaction. The first year’s TSMs show over 65s with a much higher average overall rate of satisfaction (82%) compared to other age groups.
Tenants under 65 recorded average overall satisfaction rates of below 70%, with just 63% of those aged 35 to 64 satisfied with their home and landlord.
The RSH’s national tenant survey also found that people with disabilities were less likely to give a landlord their seal of approval, with average overall satisfaction at 68%, compared with 71% among tenants without a disability.
When it came to gender, average overall satisfaction was higher among men (75%) than women (67%). White tenants, meanwhile, were more likely to be satisfied with their landlord (71%) than those from minority ethnic groups (66%).
But according to the regulator, the latter difference may be down to age rather than ethnicity. 32% of tenants who described their ethnicity as white were aged 65 or over, compared to just 6% of minority ethnic tenants.
Mushtaq Khan, chief executive of the Housing Diversity Network, says he expected satisfaction rates for tenants from ethnic minority backgrounds to be more out of kilter with the population as a whole, given this was a finding of the Better Social Housing Review, published two years ago.
A more sophisticated analysis would allow social landlords to see how demographic factors overlap. “As always, this type of data raises more questions,” says Khan. “Let’s see what follows on from this and how landlords use the findings to inform strategies for improving satisfaction.”
