By Neil Merrick
18 March 2010
Routine inspections of most social housing will end next month as a new regulatory system comes in for councils and housing associations.
The Audit Commission will still inspect arm’s-length management organisations. However, inspections of council housing departments and registered social landlords will take place only when the regulator, the Tenant Services Authority, believes its standards are not being met.
In most cases, the TSA will ask the commission to inspect at short notice, or without any warning, chief executive Peter Marsh told Public Finance following the launch of the TSA standards framework on March 16. Regulation will be ‘proportionate’ but not light-touch in future, he added.
‘If tenants are happy, homes are decent and boards and councillors are doing their job, there is nothing to cause us concern,’ he said.
The TSA, which has been regulating housing associations in England since December 2008, extends its remit to councils on April 1. The framework includes six standards, although one of these, for governance and financial viability, will apply only to RSLs, as the Audit Commission will continue to monitor governance across local government as a whole.
A requirement for landlords to report annually on how they achieve value for money has been retained in spite of widespread objections.
Local Government Association programme director Martin Wheatley said the value-for-money standard seemed to be ‘gesture politics and unnecessary complication’. But he welcomed the end of blanket inspections.
National Housing Federation assistant director Helen Williams said the NHF would monitor how the value-for-money standard was enforced.
The framework was generally welcomed by the federation, which claimed the scrapping of 54 old Housing Corporation circulars would mean less red tape. Richard Capie, director of policy at the Chartered Institute of Housing, urged all social landlords to get behind the challenge of meeting the framework ‘to deliver change and improvement for tenants’.
The TSA spent more than a year consulting over its system of co-regulation, which enables tenants to set out what they expect from landlords through so-called ‘local offers’. Marsh said its rejection of top-down targets would mean ‘a new way of doing business’ for both councils and RSLs.
