“The American people have spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what they said.” That’s what Bill Clinton told us as he struggled to make sense of the 2000 presidential election. And it’s more or less what I think of the new satisfaction measures for housing.
As Clinton spoke on the TV, I was devouring the ‘free’ breakfast in the South Bank Travelodge while running a mock inspection. Some things never change. Sadly, others do. Back then there was no need for Count Binface’s campaign to cap croissant prices.
Our regulator now compels landlords to gather satisfaction data. I’ve read loads of the individual landlord reports and I find them insightful. Many thanks to the companies who run the polls. They do good work.
The problem comes when you start to compare the results for different landlords. Some surveys are face to face, others use the phone or post, and then there are the online questionnaires. Often you get a combination of methods. We see sample surveys and we see attempts at running a census.
The way you ask the questions does affect the results. Face-to-face surveys can yield the highest scores. So, it’s tricky to compare the figures from one to another. That means we cannot readily hold landlords to account for poor work, nor can we identify the better ones to learn from.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The Competition and Markets Authority insists on an independent satisfaction survey across the largest personal current account providers. One polling firm does the work and the approach is uniform across all the banks. This makes it easy for the CMA to put out a league table for all to see. New banks such as Monzo, Starling and Chase always come top. They may well be the best of the bunch, but the lack of history helps too.
Keeping the customers happy isn’t the be all and end all in banking, or indeed in housing. Sometimes you have to say ‘no’. The Financial Conduct Authority fined Starling £29m. Why was that? “Starling’s financial screening controls were shockingly lax. It left the financial system wide open to criminals and those subject to sanctions.” In other words, it wasn’t doing enough to stop money laundering.
One big difference is that there are only 17 banks and we have many more landlords. That doesn’t mean we can’t tighten up the rules on surveys and it’d be possible to appoint one survey firm. Having one impartial referee might increase public confidence in what we do.
But even with ‘true’ results we’d still have landlords doing different mixes of things for varying groups of people in a variety of contexts. Of course, degree of difficulty drives customer satisfaction. Young people can be a tough audience. Tower blocks are harder to manage.
That’s why the RSH rightly says that the satisfaction figures are a can opener. Back in the 2000s, Ipsos MORI looked at the background factors, like demography, which drove satisfaction to predict the scores for each council housing service. They compared that to the actual figures. The better landlords exceeded expectations, others fell short. Could we return to that? It’d lead to some challenging conversations. But it may be difficult to come up with the right figure for the more spread-out associations.
Anyway, the whole point of the exercise is to get better. That’s why at HQN we don’t just look at the results – we ask what the landlord will do next. Is the improvement plan credible?
The biggest issue to come out of this round of surveys is that satisfaction with shared ownership is poor. How did we go from people queuing round the block to buy these homes to making the selfsame people so miserable? That’s a can that we must open. How do we make a start? It should be mandatory to put the official satisfaction figures in all shared ownership adverts.
Alistair McIntosh, Chief Executive, HQN
