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The TSA’s new framework is an opportunity for housing organisations to put tenants at the heart of everything they do. I congratulate the TSA on it’s approach to governance. What is important to tenants has obviously been reflected in the new standards.

Co-regulation is a new form of governance. It recognises that all organisations are different and must have the type of governance their business needs.  Housing organisations now have the freedom to innovate, for example by choosing  the best code of governance for them.

Housing organisations have been given the freedom to innovate. There will be no ‘hard rules’ as in the Key Lines of Enquires (KLoES) but instead some guiding principals. We know some housing organisations have loved the KLoEs and felt these helped raise their game. And the TSA are right to review whether in the long run this is the way to encourage continuous improvement. There is nowhere to go now beyond the three star threshold and this can’t be right. Grades can encourage ‘game playing’, achieving the grade can become the objective rather than the customers needs.  Grades however can be a motivator and one of the biggest concerns at the moment is ‘how will the new framework motivate the organisations that are ‘coasting’ along just above mediocrity or who have already reached three stars?’

It is exciting that the TSA is promoting continuous improvement through the annual process of review against the national standards and consulting and agreeing local standards with tenants to continuously add value to the national outcomes or standards.

Co-regulation will mean more tenants getting involved and this is a good thing and has always been hard. Our idea is to turn the focus as much onto ‘what we can do for you’ as ‘what you can do for us’. Members of a Tenant Scrutiny Panel are going to be playing important roles in their communities and are going to gain a terrific set of competencies, life skills and experiences. I also think there may be a role for rewarding people in other ways and there needs to be a debate about this as well.

There is a widespread agreement about the need for capacity building for boards and tenants alike. This requires proper resourcing as well as culture and vision. Value for money must be seen in a broader social accounting context.

We welcome the new era of transparency. We hope that housing associations will be required to publish benchmarking or peer review or other ‘compare a landlord’ data.  It is scandalous that benchmarking information held by benchmarking clubs has not been widely published to tenants. Governments across the European Union agreed recently to new procurement rules so that contractors are entitled to know more about successful bidders.  Commercial sensitivity is no longer a valid excuse for lack of transparency! We need to follow this example to give more information to tenants as an essential part of the new framework.