In 2025, we received our first grading from the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) under the consumer standards. We are proud to be graded as fully compliant, with scores of Viability (V1), Governance (G1) and Consumer (C2).
A C2 grade means we are fully compliant, but the regulator would like us to work on some key areas to improve outcomes for residents.
Over the next few months, we are working towards a C1 grading - the highest consumer standards rating - by focusing on:
1. Home condition surveys
These are the surveys we need to do in your home every 5 years to help us to plan long term repairs.
What we are doing
We are working to reduce the number of homes where a resident hasn’t accepted an appointment for us to complete a home condition survey. We will show you our progress by reporting the percentage of homes that have had a survey in the last five years every quarter.
- Since receiving our grading in October 2025, we have improved our performance in this area to 72% of homes by 31st March 2026.
- We are aiming for 85% of homes by 30th September 2026 and 100% by 2027.
2. Complaints handling
We are improving how we respond to complaints and reducing the main causes of complaints as a key priority.
For 2025/26, we received 61.9 stage 1 complaints per 1,000 tenant homes and 64.6 stage 1 complaints per 1,000 shared ownership homes, in line with Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) reporting.
We know that many complaints across all our services relate to how long it takes to receive a response to a service request. As a result, we are currently re-designing our Contact Centre and Local Service Model, to focus on answering residents’ queries as quickly as possible This will include more direct access for residents to speak to a team directly and a greater number of frontline staff out in our communities addressing issues.
We also know that service charge queries and properties with a managing agent are a large source of resident’s complaints. We are currently creating a new managing agent service to improve resident experience of managing agents across our portfolio, particularly related to service charge queries.
Residents told us that our complaints process itself causes a lot of frustration. We have therefore created a new complaints management model which launched in April 2026.
What we are doing
As a result of the work we have done since October 2025, by 31st March 2026 we increased the percentage of complaints being responded to in the Ombudsman timescale:
- Stage 1 acknowledgements: 39% within SLA. This temporary reduction in performance reflects the introduction of a new process and system. Performance is expected to recover in May.
- Stage 2 acknowledgements: Improved from 81% to 86% (88% across the full year)
- Stage 1 resolutions: Improved from 39% to 62% (42% across the full year)
- Stage 2 resolutions: Slight decrease from 82% to 76% (77% across the full year)
As of April 2026:
- Stage 1 acknowledgements: 39% within SLA
- Stage 2 acknowledgements: 88% within SLA
- Stage 1 resolutions: 58% within SLA
- Stage 2 resolutions: 76% within SLA
This temporary drop in performance reflects the introduction of a new process and system. Performance is expected to recover in May.
We will report on our SLA compliance improvement every quarter, with the next update in July 2026.
3. Improving communication for disabled residents
We know that disabled residents are more dissatisfied compared to all other residents. In 2025 we worked with a specialist consultancy to better understand the root cause of this dissatisfaction.
This showed us that the core challenge was related to our communication channels.
What we are doing
We are now working with Direct Access, disabled led communication consultancy, who are developing recommendations to improve all our service channels. This includes involving disabled residents throughout the improvement process.
We will track the impact on disabled residents’ satisfaction with our services through our annual TSM reporting in March 2027.
4. Improving satisfaction with the resolution of Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB)
We receive a high volume of ASB reports each year and need to improve our response to these.
What we are doing
We are bringing more resources into each of our regional operating areas to address issues faster. And working with resident groups to provide us with assurance that our improvements are working.