It’s been a tough time for housing associations as we try to raise our standards and improve relationships with our residents, all while facing funding challenges, increased scrutiny and a tighter regulatory regime.

But following the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower in 2017 and the death of Awaab Ishak in 2020, it’s crucial our sector put in place meaningful changes to ensure residents are valued, listened to and engaged with much more effectively than. As a sector, we must respond constructively and positively to the new regulatory environment.

The new Consumer Standards are a positive step forward, placing a much clearer focus on safety and quality, whilst refining the expectations around involving and communicating with residents. Alongside this, new-style regulatory inspections are already demonstrating the need for housing associations to place their customers at the centre of everything they do – previous regulatory reviews (In Depth Assessments, or IDAs) were largely concerned with the financial viability and governance of organisations. Now, how we work with and serve customers is just as important from the Regulator’s view, and this is an important and symbolic move.

The Housing Ombudsman has also assumed greater powers, and is a much stronger force within the sector, communicating more about investigations into complaints, and providing best practice reports and studies to support improvement across the board.

From my perspective, I feel there are two significant implications of this change in the regulatory dynamic.

The first is that we must all take much more care of our data – obtaining more information about our residents, their needs, preferences and challenges, and then using this information to tailor our services accordingly. Delivering standardised services is important in terms of consistency – we all need to do better on this front but this must be balanced with the ability to adjust what we do so that it is effective, convenient and appropriate for every single resident.

Secondly, we cannot lose sight of the fact that these standards and codes of conduct should be seen as the absolute minimum our residents should expect. They are not extravagant asks, they are basic levels of service, maintenance and communication that we should all be delivering, every day, every time.

More regulation and legislation is around the corner – we can expect to see more details of how we should drive professionalism within our organisations, how we should provide residents with access to information, and how quickly we respond to damp and mould and potentially other hazardous cases. These, and other changes will once more require us to collect and use data effectively, to tailor our services and take our resident engagement activities to the next level.

The challenge for housing associations is how we can embed all these expectations in our core operations, and use them as a platform to deliver more, much more, for our residents across the country.