By Jenna Riley, Performance and Research Analyst, Housing and Neighbourhoods Service, Sheffield City Council

Transparent performance reporting has never been more important in social housing.

In the wake of tragedies that have defined social housing over the last decade, the shift towards more transparency should be welcomed across the sector.

The Transparency, Influence, and Accountability Consumer Standard is a key pillar of the new social housing regulatory regime. The standard requires landlords to publish annual performance data on a range of tenant perception measures and housing management metrics.

The intention is to empower tenants, giving them easier access to information, providing them with consistent and comparable data about their landlord’s performance to allow them to scrutinise them more easily.

An annual publication is a great start – but is it enough?

I think if we truly want to empower tenants to scrutinise our performance, we can go a little further.

Here at Sheffield, I’d be the first to admit that in the time since tenant satisfaction measures were introduced, it’s taken some trial and error to figure out the best way to get this information across to our tenants in a way that’s meaningful to them.

Now, we share monthly performance updates with our tenants that not only show how we’re performing, but also highlight the real actions that we’re taking to improve their services.

Each month, we include a performance update in our tenant email bulletin – which goes out to over 25,000 people. We also post a short summary on our Housing Service’s Facebook page – giving our 5,500 followers a quick snapshot of our performance.

Every update focuses on one tenant satisfaction measure, and the recent improvement activities that relate to that measure.

A recent update we did focused on how well we listen to tenants’ views and act upon them.

We’d done a lot of work over the previous few months creating new engagement opportunities to help tenants share their views with us. This included:

• Setting up tenant panels to bring them together with decision makers
• New mystery shopping opportunities where tenants could review our services
• Launching several consultations to help shape new policies.

We had seen a rise in satisfaction in this area over the same few months and felt confident that these changes were a big contributing factor. So, we used the update to share more about these activities. We also felt it was an opportunity to promote these engagement opportunities to encourage more tenants to get involved and share their views with us.

This very focused update helped to ensure that the success of recent improvement activities, which we had seen having a positive impact on performance, weren’t lost in the sea of a much lengthier annual performance report.

I think shorter, regular performance updates can make a big difference to empowering tenants to scrutinise our services. Here’s why:

• Data familiarity – regular updates keep performance data and the meaning of tenant satisfaction measures fresh in tenants’ minds. It also prevents the information overload that can come with more lengthy, less frequent reports
• Digestibility – monthly updates are shorter and easier to read, especially for tenants who are just glancing through emails or social media. This is particularly important since we know most of our tenants engage with our communications on their phones now
• Catchier visuals – a shorter, one measure update is much easier to present visually. I personally like using Canva to create bold, simple graphics that are mobile-friendly and accessible
• Regularly celebrating progress– smaller, more incremental improvements often get lost in annual reports, especially if they link to a specific tenant satisfaction measure. Monthly updates give us a chance to highlight these wins and shout about the smaller successes that contribute to our overall improvement journey.

All of this, I think, helping tenants to better understand our performance, giving them the tools to more effectively scrutinise our services.