Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement.RSL grading3.6 We have inspected 84 RSLs that between them house around 60% of all RSLtenants in Scotland. As figure 3 illustrates, we found that 64% of the serviceswe inspected were good or excellent; 28% were fair; and eight landlords(together serving just under 5,000 tenants) were poor in terms of landlordservices, governance or financial management. We have since re-inspectedfive of these poorly performing landlords and have found improvement, withthree now providing good services.Figure 3: Grades for RSL inspected services since 2004Poor, 8%Excellent, 11%Fair, 28%Good, 53%3.7 Of the 56 smaller RSLs we have inspected (owning under 1,000 houses) 66%of their service areas were good or excellent, while 12% were poor. Wefound slightly less variable performance in RSLs owning between 1,000 and2,000 houses, where 72% of service areas were good or excellent and nonewere graded as poor. In the eight largest RSL landlords, 44% of gradedareas were good or excellent and 6% were poor.3.8 For the larger RSLs many inspections were of fairly new RSLs that tookhouses transferred from a local authority. We inspected them after their firsttwo years of operation. Our inspections found that stock transfer RSLs hadbuilt the foundations for increased investment in stock, improved tenantinvolvement, and devolved decision-making structures, while making11
Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement.progress in delivering important promises to tenants and, by necessitythrough reliance on private finance, bringing more business-like disciplinesinto the way the organisations are run and assets managed. But changes inownership structures and access to private finance are not, in themselves,sufficient to deliver the necessary improvements in performance. Few haveachieved good grades at first inspection because it takes time to bed in a neworganisation, culture and way of working and to deliver tangible serviceimprovements. Some business plans have needed early revisions,particularly where information gaps emerged or asset management prioritieschanged because of a better understanding of stock condition data andtenant priorities. Relationships with the local authority after transfer have notalways been straightforward. And getting the right governance arrangements,to move beyond the stock transfer project into running an independentorganisation, where all governing body members understand their role, hasoften absorbed significant amounts of senior management time. Theseorganisational dynamics have formed an important backdrop to the delivery ofservices and investment in the early years.3.9 We have not inspected or graded every RSL. So, the analysis of gradesoutlined above may provide only a partial view of the RSL sector’sperformance. Our engagement with the RSL sector now relies on annual riskand performance assessments, based as much as possible on theinformation RSLs routinely give us. We develop regulation plans for RSLswith whom we need a high or medium level of engagement. In our secondyear of assessments we applied our risk based methodology and concludedthat we needed to develop plans for 55 RSLs (36% of those assessed).These plans determine what sort of engagement we will have, with inspectionbeing only one of a number of possible activities. Our most recent RSLinspection programme has selected a number of RSLs for inspection basedon their development risk or poorer performance profile. This may affectgrading outcomes in future and will put more established, developing RSLsunder a greater spot-light in terms of their longer term business and financialplanning.3.10 It is important that landlords develop an efficiency and effectiveness culture inwhich they use information to monitor, cost and plan services. Our aim is toensure that robust and comparable data across different size and type of12
Page 2: Social Landlords in Scotland: Shapi
Page 7 and 8: Social Landlords in Scotland: Shapi

Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?