Agenda item

To receive an Executive Summary of the Report by Feedback Services on the Council's Tenant Satisfaction Survey 2012 (Report and Executive Summary to follow).

The Panel received a report from the Director of Housing regarding the Tenant Satisfaction Survey 2012.

Under the Government’s previous Best Value Performance Indicator (BVPI) and National Indicator (NI) regime, it was a requirement for all registered providers of housing to undertake a Tenant Satisfaction Survey every two years and then submit a headline data to the Government through the BVPIs and NIs. All registered providers used a standard STATUS Survey Form, ensuring that they all asked the same questions to aid benchmarking.

Although there was no longer a requirement to undertake such surveys, or to be benchmarked with other landlords, members and officers considered it very important to understand the views of the Council’s tenants.

The Housing Directorate had been a member of Housemark, a national housing benchmarking club, for many years. Housemark had devised a new standard tenant Satisfaction Survey Form, called STAR, for its members to use, in order to continue measuring tenant satisfaction and benchmark with other registered providers if they wished.

Accordingly, the Housing Directorate had once again commissioned Feedback Services, a well experienced, independent satisfaction survey service for social landlords, part-owned by the not-for-profit National Housing Federation, to undertake a Tenant Satisfaction Survey on behalf of the Council. The Council had last undertaken a Tenant Satisfaction Survey in 2008, but due to changes by the Government, the survey could only include general needs tenants, and excluded all sheltered housing tenants. This affected the figures and had caused some interpretation problems.

The questionnaire comprised 24 questions on four pages. Two individual mailings had taken place, the first sent on 12 March 2012. All questionnaires were returned to Feedback Services, after two weeks Feedback Services sent any tenant who had not responded, a second, full survey pack. The survey was held open one extra week as completed questionnaires were still being returned and finally closed on 20 April 2012. Incentives were used to boost the response rate. The overall response was very high at 49%, with 1,093 questionnaires returned from the 2,215 sent out, representing around 17% of all tenants. Overall, the tenant satisfaction was as follows:

(a)        The vast majority of the District Council tenants were satisfied with the services provided by the Council, and the overall rating was amongst the highest in the survey – 88%.

(b)        A higher percentage of sheltered tenants were highly satisfied with the Council’s services (93%), compared with general needs tenants.

(c)        The overall rating for services (88%) from all tenants was 3% higher than the rating awarded in 2006 (85%).

(d)        The overall rating for landlord services was 3% higher than the average found in Feedback Services’ database.

However, Feedback Services had advised that it was important to note that neither of the two comparative datasets were representative of the housing sector, and should not be taken as an indication of any national average.

RESOLVED:

(1)        That the headline findings of the Tenant Satisfaction Survey Report 2012 be noted; and

(2)        That a report be presented to the Housing Scrutiny Standing Panel later in the municipal year, providing a more representative comparison of results with other registered providers of housing.