Practical thinking on social housing governance, regulation, complaints and data, from a team that has delivered data services at national scale.
Two statutory dates now sit in the same quarter, and the Ombudsman's office changed hands between them. Here is what the summer put on the public record, what it signals, and three questions worth putting to your board before either date arrives.
The most common complaints problem we hear is not a shortage of staff or a missing system. It is that the system records every case and analyses none of them, so the board cannot answer its own questions and the resident feels the difference first.
A repair takes as long as it takes. The waiting does not have to feel the same. Faster, clearer handling of a hazard is worth something to the household, the landlord and the NHS before a single tradesperson arrives.
The Regulator publishes the seven components of an inspection and the four grade descriptors. It publishes no rule turning a set of findings into a C2 or a C3. The sector is graded on a scheme nobody has seen.
Boards, regulators and residents have been working from different, incomplete versions of the same truth, and nobody has been checking which one is right. That is the problem ScoreView and TenantSafe were built to solve.
Twenty-five years in NHS data, and I never once treated a patient. Both products come from the same instinct, and from two things that happened in my own family.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This week the Housing Ombudsman turned its attention to roof leaks and named names. The case that stops you cold is Lambeth. Here is what happened, what it signals, and three questions worth putting to your board before a report like this one lands on you.
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.
The regulatory shift for social housing is from stating you are compliant to proving it on demand. Here is what evidencing control actually requires.