What standards can you expect from us?

10 August 2022 -

Services

Each year we complete a self-assessment to make sure we’re doing everything we can to meet regulatory consumer standards. This year we fully met 3 of 4 standards and partially met 1 standard, and we have clear plans in place to improve our performance next year.

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Consumer standards are regulations that A2Dominion and all registered providers of social housing must comply with.

Their purpose is to make sure tenants:

Get quality accommodation
Have choice and protection, and
Can hold their landlords to account.

How do we assess if we’re meeting these standards?

Each year we carry out a range of activities to measure whether we are meeting the consumer standards. This is called a self-assessment and includes:

Asking resident representatives on our Customer Services Committee to assess our compliance and make recommendations for how we could improve
Our managers providing evidence to show they have complied with the standards
Our Governance team reviewing this evidence and identifying how it aligns with the Social Housing White Paper
Working with our Customer Services Committee to examine situations where assessors gave different ratings
Identifying opportunities for improvement and agreeing on actions to implement these improvements.

What did we find?

The table [1] below summarises the 4 consumer standards and our self-assessment of how we perform against each of them.

Consumer standard	Rating
Home: quality of accommodation and repairs and maintenance	Partially met (see below)
Tenancy: how properties are allocated/exchanged and terms around tenure	Met
Neighbourhood: issues around neighbourhood and communal areas and anti-social behaviour	Met
Tenant involvement and empowerment: customer service and complaints, tenant rights and involvement.	Met

Why was the Home standard partially met?

While the majority of individual requirements were fully met in the Home standard, there are various reasons why we assessed ourselves to have partially met this standard, including:

Staff vacancies and difficulties with recruiting, which meant that we couldn’t complete regular tasks related to compliance as efficiently as we need to, including some electrical testing
An increase in disrepair claims from residents, where we had not completed all works and repair requests

How we are working to do better

We’re pleased that we met 3 of the 4 consumer standards. But we know we have more work to do, to make sure you get the service you can expect.

Moving forward, we are improving compliance with all 4 consumer standards, with a focus on the Home standard, by:

Providing additional resources to resolve outstanding repair requests and compliance checks
Creating a new approach to property management that will trial a change in roles and responsibilities
Working closely with our repairs provider to streamline processes and operate more efficiently
Improving the way we communicate with you, using online and more traditional methods
Sharing information at a local area, so your neighbourhood officer has up-to-date information, you know who they are and how to contact them.

Questions?

If you have any questions about this self-assessment or would like to provide us with feedback, please get in touch.