Scotland’s Housing Network shares ‘most comprehensive’ Charter Performance data

Through its bespoke Business Intelligence tools, Charter and EESSH data will be presented from 118 landlords, representing around 70% of Scotland’s social housing sector, and will allow landlords to get an early indication of how their performance compares to their peers, as well as to understand wider sector trends.

An initial review of the data reveals evidence of the challenges currently facing the sector and demonstrates that the social housing sector continues to respond well to adversity.

In the context of Scotland’s ongoing housing emergency, there has also been an increase in the proportion of lets to homeless households amongst both local authorities and RSLs.

Nevertheless, this has been tempered by further reductions in turnover making it more difficult for the sector to meet emerging needs.

Relet times were a significant challenge for many in the sector last year, and in this context the overall divergence between local authorities and RSLs with regard to relet times continues. While many local authorities have seen some improvement in relet times, on average local authority relet times continued to increase while RSL on average are seeing reductions bringing them closer to pre-pandemic performance.

Social landlords have also supported their tenants through a cost of living crisis in recent years, and despite this this year most landlords who have provided data so far have seen some improvement in their rent arrears performance, although some have generally been relatively modest.

With regard to property condition, we can see that SHQS compliance has continued to improve for both local authorities and RSLs, while landlords continue to make progress on energy efficiency standards – no mean feat in the context of rising labour and material costs.

Andrea Finkel-Gates, chief executive officer at SHN, said: “While we don’t yet have the full picture until the SHR publishes the performance from the Annual Return on the Charter in August 2024, SHN is please to provide its members with the most comprehensive dataset on Charter Performance for 2023/24 available at the present time.

“We are confident that the experience of our members in bringing about improvements in many Charter indicators suggest that Scottish social landlords will be able to face the ongoing challenges to improve services for their tenants and communities.”