You can see our full results, including pie charts, here – a copy of this is being sent out to each household for tenants and support providers to review.
New Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs) came into force in April 2023 and are a regulatory requirement for registered providers of social housing like Care. There are 22 tenant satisfaction measures, covering five themes. Ten of these will be measured by landlords directly (technical requirements), and twelve will be measured by landlords carrying out tenant perception surveys.
Care previously carried out an exercise to determine which tenants are likely to have capacity to understand the majority of the prescribed tenant perception questions. Those who cannot are not expected to be surveyed in this way, we also chose not to include those who had moved in less than 3 months ago. We then carried out trial tenant perception surveys in March/April 2023 to learn from ahead of the requirement to publish data. This involved the whole team visiting tenants with capacity to ask the 12 prescribed questions (unless they expressed a preference to be surveyed on the phone or in writing).
We are able to ask supplementary questions as well and chose to ask some additional questions to capture satisfaction with key services we didn’t feel were covered.
Guidance was provided to Care’s team and we ensured housing officers were not surveying tenants on their own patch in an effort to minimise bias. We acknowledge that Care’s staff conducting in-person surveys may influence how tenants respond, compared to a third party.
Key results:
- We gathered 130 responses of 332 current tenants = 39%
- The majority of respondents answered fairly or very satisfied (or strongly agree/agree) to all prescribed questions (excluding ‘don’t know/not applicable’).
- 50% of total responses to prescribed questions (excluding ‘don’t know/not applicable’) were very satisfied and only 3% very dissatisfied.
- The majority of respondents felt they couldn’t answer questions 11 and 12 re ASB and contribution to neighbourhoods.
- Not every tenant answered every question but we still included answers they did give meaning there are not the same number of responses for every question.
- Lowest satisfaction was with time taken for repairs (and complaints handling, though the respondents had not made formal complaints).
- We also asked about satisfaction with housing officers – 84.5% of respondents were fairly or very satisfied with this service.
Few questions are directly comparable to what we asked in the 2022 tenant satisfaction survey. Those that are show a slight decrease in satisfaction. This in not surprising and reflects an article in Inside Housing which suggested satisfaction is approximately 15% lower via the TSMs than in standard satisfaction surveys.
Communication was a key theme within critical comments and it appears Care can get better at communicating directly with tenants and at communication regarding planned maintenance. We can also work with contractors and support providers to ensure they are passing messages on appropriately – a piece of work is already underway to set expectations around information sharing with our support provider partners.
We have learned a lot from this process and are working to improve satisfaction as well as making the exercise itself smoother and more beneficial for all next time round.