Judgement of the Regulator of Social Housing

Other areas the Regulator has raised concerns about?

The Regulator has advised that there should be more detailed performance reporting to tenant engagement groups, and within the council to the Corporate Leadership Team (Chief Executive and Assistance Chief Executives) and the Housing Committee. The Council recognises the importance of this, and a new structure of oversight and reporting within the council is being implemented. 

We have, in addition, added information to the regular performance reporting to the Council’s Housing Committee and these reports will be regularly reviewed by the Corporate Leadership Team and the new Tenants’ Experience Panel. More detailed reporting will be included in the Tenant newsletters.   

The Council has large contracts for work undertaken in your homes and for some of the works or safety checks we should have a second contractor to audit a percentage of the work being undertaken by our main contractors. We have this in place for gas boiler installations and gas servicing, fire safety works, and asbestos removal.  We are now, in addition, putting this in place for electrical testing, rewiring, and water management.  

The time taken to reply to tenant complaints has not been within the targets set out in the Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code, To enable the council to meet these targets, additional resources are being committed. The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code  timescales are also in the Council’s Complaints Policy. 

The Council has an elected member (or councillor) responsible for complaints. This is the Chair of the Housing Committee, Councillor Mike Smith.  An anonymised list of complaints is shared with him on a monthly basis, and he randomly selects a number to review. He is provided with all the communication associated with the complaint, including any recorded phone calls, so that he can check the investigation into complaints is thorough and the responses appropriate. 

The Council has not updated the diversity information that it holds for our tenants recently and so we are unable to provide detailed reports on outcomes for specific groups of people.  The Council has created a new post to support our work on customer insight and experience. This post has been approved to ensure this data is regularly updated and used to design and prioritise service delivery. 

We will be carrying out a survey of all our tenants to capture information, and we ask that all tenants respond. This is to enable us to design our services to reflect the needs of our tenants and monitor our services in this context, to ensure that we are providing accessible and fair services. Tenants can manage their tenancy and communicate with us through a housing online account and can update this information in the account.
Registering for an account is easy and takes a couple of minutes, all you need to get started is an email address:

Step One: Register for a OneAccount
Step Two: Enter your email address
Step Three: Confirm your email address from the email sent to your inbox
Step Four: Continue the registration process by completing the information required. The registration form requires your first name, surname, postal address. 

Please find link: OneAccount 

The Regulator met with engaged tenant groups and has reflected that we are lacking scrutiny of services and performance by our tenants, and that tenants are not influencing the agenda of meetings. 

The Council currently has the following groups which tenants can participate in: 

  • Repairs and Maintenance Group - this looks at performance on day-to-day repairs, upgrades including bathrooms, kitchens, roofs, and boilers; and re-letting empty homes. 
  • Neighbourhood and Communities Group – looks at tenant satisfaction, policies, and estate improvement proposals.
  • Communications Group – members do not meet as a group but advise via email, about our leaflets, publications, and items on the website. 

A new Tenant Experience Panel is being launched to provide a formal opportunity for tenants’ opinions and oversight of performance to be shared with the Council’s Housing Committee. If you wish to participate, please contact: listening@runnymede.gov.uk or 01932 838383 or you can find information on this and other ways to have your say on our website at Get involved

There are many ways to get involved, from quick surveys to regular meetings. No matter how much time you have, we would like tenants to get involved.

We need to improve the information provided to tenants and publish our service standards so tenants know the timescale that they should receive a response to specific enquiries. We are working on these and will be discussing the standards with the new Tenant Experience Panel to ensure that tenants’ views are reflected in the priority given to different enquiries. 

We will use the Tenant Newsletters and our website to inform tenants about service standards. We are also reviewing our tenant handbook to ensure that it has all the information that tenants need to manage their tenancy. 

In September 2025, we introduced a new Case Management System so that we will be able to report on contacts from tenants by subject, allocate them the correct priority and monitor our response times. This system will allow us to monitor our services against the standards we develop.

The Council became aware of an error in 2003 in setting the rent for 16 properties. This has been corrected and the tenants have been advised of the error,  refunded and compensated. Following this discovery, we arranged for an external consultancy to carry out an independent audit, and we are now reviewing all our rent setting to ensure the rent for each property and annual increases are correct and in line with the government rent setting policy. The Council advised the Regulator of the issues that we had found through a “self-referral”. 

Almost all our properties are set at a social rent and the formula to calculate rents is set by the government who also set a maximum increase each year for social housing landlords. For some homes we need to have a valuation, as they have been purchased or extended since the original valuations were completed by the Council in 1999.  The Council’s Housing Committee have approved additional funding to create a new post of Housing Revenue Account Income Manager to oversee all income and rent setting. Once in post, the new postholder will complete a review of our rents using a new software system and we will have a further external audit carried out.