Insights

Practical thinking on social housing governance, regulation, complaints and data, from a team that has delivered data services at national scale.

16 August 2026 · 4 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

Awaab's Law Phase 2 lands on 30 November 2026. Here is what changes.

Phase 2 extends the statutory clocks from damp and mould to seven further hazard types. The duty is the same shape; the volume of cases it applies to is not.

  • Awaab's Law
  • Damp and mould
  • Compliance
13 August 2026 · 6 min read · Guy Meynell

The tenants' group is not goodwill spending. It is assurance infrastructure.

Community investment is usually defended as the right thing to do. Under proactive consumer regulation it has become something harder-edged: the earliest, cheapest point at which a landlord finds out what is wrong in its homes.

  • Community investment
  • Social value
  • Consumer Standards
4 August 2026 · 6 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

Two records a landlord does not author

Internal reporting is built to hold the line rather than to go looking. The two records that test it, one from the public file and one from the resident, are the two a landlord does not write itself.

  • Complaints
  • Awaab's Law
  • Evidence
4 August 2026 · 5 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

Published is not the same as comparable

The Housing Ombudsman publishes more than almost any comparable body. That is not the same as publishing something you can safely count, and the difference decides whether a league table means anything.

  • Housing Ombudsman
  • Data quality
  • Benchmarking
3 August 2026 · 4 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

Five questions for your next board meeting

Five questions that test the distance between what a board is told and what an outside reader can already see. None of them needs new data to answer.

  • Board assurance
  • Complaints
  • Awaab's Law
27 July 2026 · 5 min read · Guy Meynell

The hardest part of a complaint is not the problem. It is not knowing what happens next.

A housing complaint distresses residents less through the fault itself than through the powerlessness around it. The behavioural science points to a design answer, and it is the thinking behind TenantSafe.

  • Resident voice
  • Complaints
  • Behavioural science
26 July 2026 · 4 min read · Peter Robinson

Two of four landlords drew the same finding. It was not about repairs.

In one inspection round, two of the four landlords the Regulator graded were marked down on the same thing: how anti-social behaviour was recorded. That is a data problem, not a housing one.

  • Anti-social behaviour
  • Complaints
  • Data governance
19 July 2026 · 4 min read · Guy Meynell

Your residents know how to complain. Do they know what it becomes?

Tenant satisfaction is now treated as regulatory evidence, not a soft measure. That changes what a resident's first report is, and who should be holding the record.

  • Resident voice
  • Complaints
  • Tenant Satisfaction Measures
12 July 2026 · 5 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

The C1 landlords are not the ones with the best homes

Two landlords with near-identical stock can receive very different regulatory grades. The gap between them is data. Why assurance is now a board-level data capability.

  • Data governance
  • Consumer Standards
  • Governance
5 July 2026 · 4 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

Awaab's Law starts a statutory clock. Can you prove when?

Every Awaab's Law timeframe runs from the moment a landlord becomes aware of a hazard, through any channel. That makes it a data problem before it is a repairs problem.

  • Awaab's Law
  • Damp and mould
  • Data governance
28 June 2026 · 4 min read · Richard Sutcliffe

Evidencing the Consumer Standards, why control has to be provable, not asserted

The regulatory shift for social housing is from stating you are compliant to proving it on demand. Here is what evidencing control actually requires.

  • Consumer Standards
  • Governance
  • Regulation