The Regulator of Social Housing has today (7 March 2023) published its 'Value for money metrics and reporting 2022'. The report highlights the importance of social housing providers delivering value for money, by making the best use of their resources to achieve their objectives. This underpins the provision of good quality homes and services, as well as the delivery of new homes.
The challenging economic climate in which providers are operating, along with greater focus on the quality of their homes and services, makes value for money increasingly significant.
The financial pressures faced by providers are highlighted in the regulator's report, which found that half the sector's headline costs in 2022 related to spending on maintenance and major repairs. As a result, providers are seeing lower operating margins and interest cover. This trend has become even more visible in the current financial year, as shown in the regulator's recent quarterly survey of providers' finances.
Against this backdrop, the regulator has reinforced the need for providers to be transparent about value for money. Crucial to this is being open with all stakeholders, including tenants and investors, when reporting on decision making and performance. This allows stakeholders to hold providers to account and compare them against others in the sector.
Providers are required to report each year on their performance against a suite of value for money measures set by the regulator. The regulator has analysed this information and the key findings are:
- Stronger responses clearly explained what the provider was planning to achieve with their available resources, along with measurable targets. And where providers needed to change their objectives, they gave clear explanations.
- The best responses also gave open and accurate insights into the provider's performance against similar organisations in the sector.
- In weaker responses, providers did not follow the regulator's reporting methods which made their responses less accurate and transparent.
- Some providers did not explain why they missed certain performance targets, or why they continued with activities that did not appear to deliver the best outcomes.
The regulator's findings provide important feedback and should be used by all providers to improve the way they report on value for money.
Fiona MacGregor, Chief Executive of RSH, said:
Housing associations are faced with significant economic challenges, as well as multiple and competing pressures on their resources. Providers need to manage these difficult trade-offs and make best use of their resources, so they can continue to deliver their core objectives of providing safe, well-maintained homes for their tenants and invest in new homes.
It is more important than ever that Boards have a clear understanding of their organisation's performance, and that they communicate their decisions to stakeholders in an open and accurate way.
The regulator's value for money report is available on the Global accounts 2022 page of the website.
Notes
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Value for money is one of the regulator's standards and the report sets out private registered providers' performance against it, covering the year up to 31 March 2022. The report enables a wide range of stakeholders, including tenants, to assess their landlord's performance against the rest of the sector.
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The Value for money report is part of the regulator's continuing work to help the sector contextualise the performance of individual providers more easily. It aims to help boards compare themselves to organisations with similar business models and geographical locations. It is an annex to RSH's Global Accounts, published in January 2023.
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Along with the report, RSH has published data for individual private registered providers. This is provided in the Value for money metrics data file. The report is also accompanied by a detailed Value for money technical note, which explains the metrics in greater depth. These documents and all previous VFM publications can be found on our VFM collections guidance and reports page.
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The Regulator of Social Housing promotes a viable, efficient and well-governed social housing sector able to deliver homes that meet a range of needs. It does this by undertaking robust economic regulation focusing on governance, financial viability and value for money that maintains lender confidence and protects the taxpayer. It also sets consumer standards and may take action if these standards are breached and there is a significant risk of serious detriment to tenants or potential tenants.
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