TSM approach

Approach and methodology

Tenant Satisfaction Measures, 2023-24

Being open and transparent is one of our values.

On top of this, the Tenant Satisfaction Measures have been designed to help customers, our regulator and partners compare how we’re doing against other landlords. So our methods need to be robust.

Our approach has been reviewed by our Operations Committee and been approved by our Board.

  • Our customers have helped us by providing valuable insights that we have used to calculated the 12 tenant perception measures in the TSMs.
  • The remaining 10 TSMs have been worked out using management information on our performance that we hold.

Note: the TSMs don’t cover all our customers. For example, our leasehold customers are excluded but we will report on performance in these areas elsewhere, such as in our customer annual report.

 

Find out more about the methodology behind this year’s figures…

 

We conducted a survey, following the Tenant Survey Requirements set out by our regulator. 

More details about our survey:

  • Phone - there are a lot of questions in the TSM survey, so we find telephone surveys are the best way to reach people to get this amount of information. It also means we can ask follow up questions to better understand our customers' feelings or to help get queries resolved for them.
  • Quarterly – we do a rolling survey at quarterly intervals so we can monitor seasonal trends during the year and get feedback more frequently.
  • Sample – we survey a representative sample of our customers to make sure we’re not targeting the same people too often and giving them “survey fatigue”. It also allows us to get quicker, more regular results throughout the year. To reach a 4% confidence interval, we needed to survey at least 520 tenants.

See our full methodology statement here.

Our tenant perception scores are based on 521 responses from our tenants (this includes our Independent Living residents).

For some questions, the score will be based on a smaller number of responses. This is because some questions only applied to customers who sad they had used the service in question within the last 12 months (e.g. repairs or complaints).

We also surveyed 114 other customers. These are not included in the TSM scores because:

  • Shared owners – we don’t have more than 1,000 shared owners yet. This means we don’t meet the threshold to report on Low Cost Home Ownership homes (LCHO) to the Regulator.
  • Leaseholders, former shared owners who have staircased to 100%, market rent tenants, garage customers – these groups are not covered by the Regulator of Social Housing so are not included in TSM reporting.

It's important customers can be as honest as they like. So, we often use independent agencies to help us collect information on how our customers are feeling.

For the TSMs, we work with a partner called IFF Research.

IFF Research have been operating since 1965 and have supported the housing sector for over 13 years. They are a full-service research agency and well-established and trusted partner of many government bodies and businesses.

See IFF's full methodology statement here.

But we also asked some extra questions about:

  • Repairs and maintenance - if the respondent hadn't had a repair in the last 12 months, we asked customers how they felt about this service in general to get their views.
  • Ease and effort - we asked customers if they found us easy to deal with and why.
  • Trust - we also wanted to find out if customers trusted that we would do what we said we would do.
  • Neighbourhood – we wanted to find out if customers were happy with their neighbourhood as a place to live.
  • Value for money – our survey also explored whether our customers are satisfied with their rents or service charges, depending on which they pay.

Our survey also includes some follow up questions so we can better understand why customers feel the way they do.

The full script for our TSM telephone survey is available here.

No, we didn’t weight our results.

The scores you can see here are the combined totals of all surveys from each quarter. When we checked, we found that our responses were representative of our customer profile in most areas.

We didn’t choose to exclude any relevant tenants from the survey.

Our sample was random.

However, some customers were not included on the survey list because they have told us that they want to opt out of doing surveys with us.

We set quotas to make sure we matched our customer profile for age and customer type (ie LCRA or LCHO).

We also double checked the responses we received to make sure they represented our customer profile in these areas:

  • Age group
  • Tenure
  • Local area (by ward)
  • Ethnic group
  • Gender
  • Disability

We didn’t meet any challenges in getting representative data in these areas. But, now we have our first year of data, we will review the trends and may set quotas for other demographic information in future.

No, we didn’t.

We’re very grateful to every customer who gave us their time to speak to IFF and do the TSM survey.

Depending on the measure, we used data from:

  • Our central housing management system
  • Our building safety compliance logs
  • Evidence sent by third-party landlords (where we do not hold the freehold on a building)

Each TSM is different. We’ve aligned with the Tenant Satisfaction Measures - Technical requirements for each measure.

The following measures include Low Cost Rented Accommodation (LCRA – aka social housing tenants) and Low Cost Home Ownership (LCHO – aka shared ownership homes):

  • Building safety – gas, asbestos, fire risk assessments, legionella risk assessments and passenger lift checks.
  • Anti-social behaviour and hate crime.

Because we do not meet the threshold to report on LCHO homes, the following measures only include our LCRA customers/homes:

  • Compliance with Decent Homes Standards
  • Repairs completed on time
  • Complaints

Although we own and manage almost 5,500 homes in total, our TSM scores relate to:

  • Low Cost Rented Accommodation (LRCA): 4,103 homes
  • Low Cost Home Ownership (LCHO): 438 homes

For each metric, we have followed the calculation methodology set out in the Tenant Satisfaction Measures - Technical requirements.

Each metric has been validated by our Business Improvement team.

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