Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement.Figure 8: Comparison of RSL and LA repairs completion rates, 2007/0855504540% of landlords3530252015105071-75 76-80 81-85 86-90 91-95 96-100% repairs completed on targetLAs RSLsSource: APSR 2007/08 and Audit Scotland4.29 Our inspections have found improving performance indicators for compliancewith gas safety regulations. But we still find significant pockets of poorperformance. It is important to the health and wellbeing of tenants thatlandlords ensure that all the gas appliances and flues they provide for theirtenants are safe for use.4.30 Organisations we have inspected have shown a faster rate of improvementacross housing management performance indicators than organisations wehave not selected for inspection. This year we will test whether our riskbased approach in RSLs has resulted in improvements in particularorganisations and in areas of service or management we highlighted forimprovement.4.31 The housing management indicators we have outlined should be relativelyeasy to measure. Our inspections show that landlords do not alwaysmeasure them accurately. This is particularly true of completion times forrepairs and often these measurement weaknesses significantly compromisethe reliability of reported performance. We carried out a small number ofverification visits last year to check how RSLs are recording their housingmanagement performance figures. In general, we found performancemonitoring was given a low priority and we found several cases where RSLsdid not keep good enough records to support the information they supply tous. In some cases we had to ask organisations to bring these weaknesses to27
Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement.the attention of their governing body and to report back to us on a plan ofaction to address them. In light of these findings, we plan to continueverification visits this year. It is important that landlords get the basics righton these indicators. But landlords could also do more to capture betterqualitative information about things like void standards and the condition ofestates.4.32 Indicators of housing management costs per unit vary widely across thesector, and the data is muddied by the different accounting and classificationapproaches. But the overall pattern is of costs increasing significantly andwell ahead of rates of inflation in both RSLs and local authorities. Housingprofessionals offer a range of reasons for cost growth:• the loss of good and easier to manage stock and tenancies through rightto buy – leaving fewer houses to spread their overheads against andstock that is more resource intensive to manage – and it is hard to reducestaff numbers when stock reduces in a piecemeal way;• staff salaries running ahead of inflation in what is a labour intensive sectorand when higher paid staff need to be recruited to deal with more strategictasks;• staffing increases to respond to new duties and expectations imposed bycare, charity and housing regulators and central government policy andstrategy requirements (e.g. homelessness, antisocial behaviour),alongside the need for greater health and safety and legal compliancechecks (e.g. energy certificates, gas servicing etc);• they believe that local authorities may be charging an increasing share ofhomelessness and other non-landlord costs to the housing revenueaccount (and helping to reduce council tax pressures);• the higher levels of intensive management needed to help morevulnerable tenants sustain their tenancies or to deal with a more difficultclient base; and• housing managers are having to deal with more functions than beforewhile meeting higher expectations among tenants for improved services.4.33 While these observations are useful, we know that social landlords are notalways good at managing costs or introducing greater business discipline intohousing service delivery. A number of landlords do not demonstrate that theyare focused on value for money, cost control or securing efficiencies. The28
Page 2: Social Landlords in Scotland: Shapi
Page 7 and 8: Social Landlords in Scotland: Shapi

Social Landlords in Scotland: Shaping up for improvement

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?