By Alistair McIntosh, chief executive, Housing Quality Network

Wes Streeting wants to boost the NHS. One of his ideas is to link funding for hospitals to rates of patient satisfaction. Who dreams up this stuff?

Anyway, on LinkedIn I asked if this might be an idea for housing. Sparks flew so Housing Today asked me to put pen to paper.

Time to fess up! In the early 1990s I wrote a pamphlet for Coopers & Lybrand (now PWC) pushing the notion of performance-related pay. Well, I was earning next to nothing so it was worth a punt. Off we went to the Chartered Insitute of Housing conference with high hopes but no one was interested in the idea of linking pay to satisfaction.

On the plus side we did win a prize for our stall – it was a sort of snakes and ladders board in the style of Roy Lichtenstein. We were delighted – our bosses at Coopers & Lybrand, less so. They wanted us to win business, which is a bit of an achilles heel of mine to be fair.

By 2010 or so performance pay was all the rage for the top brass. But it had little or nothing to do with tenant satisfaction. If you sold lots of homes you got the big bucks. From the start you could tell that some of these deals would turn sour. So I suggested that bonuses should be retrospective. Let’s give it a couple of years to see how things worked out before paying out. This went down like a lead balloon. This was a pity – a few claw backs would have helped the landlords and residents that were on the wrong side of these deals.

For the past two years the Regulator of Social Housing has ordered the sector to gather satisfaction data. Should we use it as a tool for allocating cash

Where to start.

The RSH stipulates the questions that landlords must ask. But it does not tell you how to collect the data. So we see different mixes of face to face, phone and internet surveys.

Face to face can be a good choice if you want to build rapport but it gives higher results than internet surveys. So the idea of allocating cash by satisfaction rates falls at the first hurdle. At the moment the data is not consistent. Surely we can fix that?

Then we move on to context. Older residents tend to be more satisfied and urban flats are tougher to manage. So how do we get beyond the age old complaints about comparing apples with pears?

Matthew Taylor the leader of the NHS Confederation makes this very point in his reply to Wes Streeting.

“Patient experience is determined by far more than their individual interaction with the clinician and so, unless this is very carefully designed and evaluated, there is a risk that providers could be penalised for more systemic issues, such as constraints around staffing or estates, that are beyond their immediate control to fix.”

Luckily, we have been here many times before in housing.

Our old friends in Ipsos MORI used to predict the satisfaction level for every council housing service based on a range of local factors. Then they would look at the real survey figures. As I recall Carrick, down in Cornwall, greatly exceeded expectations. Could you do this now given the geographic complexity of so many associations? I’m not aware of any pollsters touting this service.

Back in the day many thought relying on data was too blunt an instrument. You had to go and look at the service on the ground. Hence the Audit Commission’s Housing Inspectorate came into being. And their ratings backed up by in-depth reports did shift resources around the country. They paid little or no attention to boardrooms. Instead they interviewed staff at all levels, deployed tenant inspectors and scoured the estates for evidence. It was the start of the digital camera era that the campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa took to new levels.

The RSH inspectors today do seek to make rounded judgments. They rarely cite satisfaction levels in their reports. I am not alone in raising an eyebrow when 34% satisfaction amongst shared owners is enough for C1. Or that 47% tenant satisfaction is C2. It is perfectly possible that these C ratings are fine. But where is the detail to back this up?

Regulators and the public don’t always see eye to eye. The regulators hit a bank loved by its customers with a £29m fine for not doing enough to counter money laundering. In our world Newham enjoys high satisfaction but no one disputes the rock bottom C4 rating.

Where does that leave us? Satisfaction ratings on their own aren’t a sensible way to allocate resources. Context is a big factor.

We know you can divvy up cash based on detailed inspection reports. But for now the RSH reports are just too thin. Yes they could and should release the background papers – but the RSH don’t visit estates. I need first hand relentless photographic evidence of real life to back up ratings. And it should be easy to do in the modern era.

At the same time as the RSH told landlords to gather satisfaction data, they also ordered stock condition surveys. Of course, big bills are flowing from these. How do we strike the balance between fixing the homes we have and those that we need to build? Could we use the RSH inspectors to constructively challenge how landlords approach these decisions? Analysing satisfaction data carefully would be one element. Many fine people work at the RSH. Let’s use them well.

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This article originally appeared on the Housing Today website here.