We did not set out to build housing software. We set out to solve a problem the sector had stopped questioning: boards, regulators and residents are working from different, incomplete versions of the same truth, and nobody is checking which one is right.
A board reads a paper assembled by the people whose work it describes. A regulator reads a published record assembled from inspections, judgements and returns. A resident holds a third account, the one they lived through, which usually reaches nobody in a form anyone can act on. All three are describing the same organisation. They rarely agree, and the disagreement is almost never visible until an inspection, a determination or a complaint makes it visible.
That is what ScoreView and TenantSafe are for. They are separate products doing different jobs for different people, but they start from the same principle: the evidence that tests an organisation should not be evidence the organisation writes about itself.
Why a data business ended up in housing
The instinct came from healthcare. Our technology leadership spent twenty-five years in regulated public service, most of it at NHS Digital and NHS England, building national data infrastructure and clinical standards to a bar set by the Information Commissioner's Office and the Care Quality Commission. Girish Solanki, our Chief Commercial Officer, brings four decades on the front line of local authority housing and social care. Outside-in data discipline on one side, a lived understanding of how a housing provider and a council actually run on the other.
The discipline that mattered was never the technology. It was making a decision stand up to governance scrutiny, and making sure the person the system was built for could still use it.
The two sectors are also more entangled than their separate governance structures suggest. The Building Research Establishment put the cost of poor housing to the NHS at around £1.4bn a year in first-year treatment costs alone, £857m of it attributable to excess cold as the single largest hazard (The Cost of Poor Housing in England, 2021 briefing paper, at 2018 prices). Two boards, one in health and one in housing, frequently hold data on the same population and the same outcomes without ever comparing notes.
So moving into social housing was a continuation of the brief rather than a departure from it. Regulated, citizen-facing, and short of the shared evidence that would let two systems trust each other's numbers.
What an outside-in view actually changes
ScoreView is built entirely from the public record: regulatory judgements, Ombudsman determinations, the sector data anyone can read. The same sources an inspector, a lender or a journalist would use.
It does not replace a provider's internal assurance work, and it is not meant to. It tests it. A board and an audit committee can see whether their own assurance reporting and their public record tell the same story to somebody with no stake in the answer, and where the two accounts have drifted apart. Think of what a credit reference agency does for the business world, applied to social housing.
The value is in the timing. Drift between the internal account and the public one is discovered eventually, either way. The question is whether the organisation finds it, or an external party does, in the fortnight before a board meeting or in the middle of an inspection.
The record a landlord does not write
TenantSafe is the counterpart, and it comes at the same problem from the other end. It is in beta, and it is free to residents.
A resident describes what happened in plain words. They get a plain-language read on the issue, the statutory reference and timescale that applies to it, visibility of what happens at each stage, and a dated record from the first point of contact that they keep. It does not stop a complaint reaching a landlord, and it is not designed to.
What it changes is the quality of the first record. A repair, damp, mould or safety concern is mapped to the right Code reference and the right statutory clock as it happens, so what used to arrive as ad hoc noise arrives as a timestamped, evidenced trail. That is the record Awaab's Law and the Ombudsman are asking for, and it is the one most often reconstructed under pressure months later.
For a landlord, that means a complaint logged, categorised and dated correctly on day one. For a resident, it means not needing fluency in the Complaint Handling Code to be heard.
Who this is actually for
The honest answer is everyone in the chain, for different reasons.
Providers get a continuous check on their own reporting, and complaints that arrive structured rather than as noise. Boards and audit committees get papers grounded in the same evidence a regulator will use, which turns assurance sign-off from a matter of trust into a matter of record. The Regulator and the Ombudsman get better-evidenced practice on the ground and cases that already reflect the Code's stages at first contact. Residents get a sense of control and an end to open-ended uncertainty, which are the two things that reduce distress before anything has actually been fixed.
None of that depends on a provider being in trouble. It depends on the organisation being willing to look at itself the way the record already describes it.
The change is in who holds the account
Assurance you have marked yourself is not assurance. A board deserves to see its own record the way an outsider already can, and a resident should not need to be fluent in the Complaint Handling Code to be heard.
That is not really a compliance product. It is a change in who gets to hold the account of what happened, and everybody in the system is better off for it.