Judgement of the Regulator of Social Housing

During a recent inspection, the Regulator of Social Housing graded the Council’s landlord services as C4 against the Consumer Standards. They highlighted several areas where they consider the Council is failing to meet the expected standards for social housing and where we need to improve our services.

The Regulator inspected Runnymede Housing Services as part of a new regulatory regime, and it was our first inspection.

The Inspection was to assess whether the Council is meeting the Consumer Standards introduced in 2024. The Council had carried out its own assessment and identified areas where we are not meeting the standards. It has approved budgets for work, along with approval to recruit additional staff that are required to achieve compliance, in order to deliver a sustainable level of service that tenants should expect.

The Regulator will be checking on our progress in complying with all the standards.

A brief summary of the findings follows in summary points 1 to 8 and there is more detailed information on the findings and the Council’s response.

1. The Regulator found that we had insufficient external checks and audits on our operations to provide them with assurance about the condition and safety of our stock. We will be increasing our external audits and getting additional contractors to do quality checks on a percentage of our main contractors’ work.
2.  We have overdue fire risk actions as a result of fire risk assessments of communal areas – we are arranging contracts for these specialist works.
3. We do not hold enough diversity information on our tenants’ protected characteristics and so we cannot evidence that our services are accessible or are providing fair and transparent outcomes. We will be updating our tenant data through a range of methods, online, by post and in person if needed.
4. We are not responding to complaints within the required timescales. We have created a new job role to assist with this.
5. We have active tenant engagement groups but tenants are not involved in decision making or providing scrutiny of our performance.  We have established a Tenant Experience Panel which will provide an opportunity for tenants to review performance, advise on matters such as service priorities and standards and review  policies before being submitted to Housing Committee. 
6. We need to provide more information to tenants and ensure that this is in accessible formats. We will be publishing more detailed information on our website and in communications we send to you.
7. We need more oversight of the repairs contractor’s contact centre. We are introducing more satisfaction surveys and monitoring of phone calls from tenants.
8. We identified an error in 2003 in the rent setting for 16 properties and as a result of this we had an external audit completed. We refunded affected tenants and notified the Regulator of the rent error so although it does not form part of the Inspection it is covered in the judgement. A new job role to oversee rent setting and rent collection has been created and when the recommendations from the first audit have been completed, a second external audit will be commissioned.