What is the Tenant Services
Authority?
The TSA is the new regulator for homes
owned by housing associations and co-ops. From spring 2010, it
is likely to be responsible for local council and arms length
management organisation (ALMO) landlords too.
The first thing the TSA needs to do is
draw up a brand new set of standards for all social landlords.
These standards will be very important, as the TSA will be
monitoring how well landlords do in achieving them – it will
be taking action against any social landlords who don’t.
How the TSA can help you.
The TSA is going to listen to tenants across England to help
them understand what tenants themselves want to see in the new
standards.
The TSAs Tenant Empowerment Programme enables local authority
and housing association tenants to gain independent advice,
training and information to challenge, influence or control how
housing services are delivered to their communities. Local
Authority tenants have a legal right to manage their own homes and
housing association residents have a voluntary route to tenant
management. Surveys show that tenant satisfaction is generally
higher where tenants have taken on the management or community
ownership of their own housing.
TSA New Regulatory Framework for Social Housing
The TSA has published its decision statement on the new
regulatory framework which governs social Housing from 1 April
2010.
The six standards in the regulatory framework describe the
required outcomes and some speacific expectations to which all
providers are expected to comply. The standards are:
- Tenant involvement and empowerent, incluing customeer service,
choice and complaints, and understanding and responding to diverse
needs
- Home, including quality of accomodation and repairs and
maintenance
- Tenancy, inclusing allocations, rents and
tenure Neighbourhood and community, inclusing
neighbourhood management, local area co-operation and
anti-social behaviour
- Value for money
- Governance and financial viability
The new framework heralds a fundamental shift in how the sector
is regulated by:
- Ensuring the six standards are based on clear outcomes tenants
care about, not detailed processes.
- Giving tenants the opportunity to agree with their landlords a
locally tailored offer on the standards around home, neighbourhood
and community and involvement.
- Embedding the principle of co-regulation where discussions
about service delivery takes place between landlords and their
tenants, not in response to top-down prescription or performance
indicators from the regulator.
- Providing new rights for tenants to be able to scrutinise their
landlords performance as part of promoting self-improvement and
accountability.
- Placing emphasis on those who govern providers to ensure there
is effective performance and accountability to tenants.
- Withdrawing around 875 pages of guidance notes and circulars
that were previously used to regulate by the Housing
Corporation.
- Ending routine inspections for all providers but inspecting for
compliance when the TSA suspects a landlord is failing to meet the
standards.
View
the Tenant Involvement - Assessing Landlords Progress report
(PDF 1.9KB)
View the New regulatory framework for Housing standards from 1st
April 2010 (PDF 1.052 KB)
View
the TSA's Tenant Empowerment programme.
View how landlords and
Housing Associations are performing in your area
Information about the Tenant Services Authority
If you would like to discuss the Tenant Sevices Authority with a
member of staff, please call the New Initatives Team on 0845 113
3000 or email involvement@mhs.org.uk.
You can contact the Tenant Services Authority on 0845
230 7000 or visit the Tenant Service Authority website at
http://www.tenantservicesauthority.org.