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Section 1 Introduction

1.02 Policy background

The Regulation & Inspection Division of Communities Scotland is responsible for regulating both registered social landlords and the landlord, homelessness and factoring functions of local authorities. Together with Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (CoSLA) and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA), Communities Scotland has published a set of Performance Standards that form the core of its regulatory framework. These standards are organised into 20 Guiding Standards and 33 Activity Standards and provide clear expectations for social landlords. The Guiding Standard GS3.1 on responsiveness to service users provides a clear statement that the regulator expects social landlords to demonstrate that they seek the views of all service users and that they respond to service users’ views and priorities. Other guiding standards such as GS2.2 Tenant Participation and GS1.3 Commitment to Continuous Improvement are also relevant to the drive to improve performance and service standards in social housing.

There is a statutory framework for tenant participation under the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001 in relation to registered tenant organisations. Where landlords have proposals that affect all tenants, they are expected to ensure that arrangements are in place to allow all tenants who wish to make their views known the opportunity to do so. Landlords have discretion to decide what form such consultation should take and it is likely that this will include both consultation with members of registered tenant organisations and individual tenants. A good practice framework for tenant participation in Scotland is available and provides a number of examples of techniques to encourage tenant participation which complement those provided here. There is also a Guide to Successful Tenant Participation which complements this guidance.

Consultation is central to the assessment of Best Value, which became a statutory duty for local authorities under the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003. Whilst local authorities are required to conduct service reviews, regular service or policy reviews are also likely to be necessary for RSLs. Seeking customer or service user feedback is an essential part of such reviews.

There is no universally accepted approach to conducting service or policy reviews. The focus of this guidance are approaches to gathering customer or service user views, largely on an individual basis, and this includes tenants, owners, shared owners, other residents, homeless people and other housing applicants.

The guidance promotes the engagement of service users in the process of seeking views on service quality. This includes engagement in the development of a strategic framework for research and consultation and in all stages of the processes of research design, data collection and analysis, reporting, action planning and monitoring. The guidance includes a number of participatory and group methods that may be used for service user research and consultation, as well as part of a tenant participation or consultation strategy.

This guidance is designed to meet the needs of the whole sector.

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