The Role of Data in Social Housing: Fortem's Approach to Supporting Landlords to deliver better outcomes for tenants and communities. By Dan Churton.

Social housing plays a crucial role providing affordable and safe homes to millions across the UK, but the sector is under pressure to deal with declining standards and poor performance, set against higher regulatory expectations, greater scrutiny and growing financial pressures

The Social Housing Regulation Act responded to critical issues and events in the sector, such as the Grenfell Fire and the death of Awaab Ishaak, and increased accountability and standards and created a more rigorous monitoring and assessment regime. For landlords to improve performance and meet all their competing agendas, they must gain control of their data and use it to drive better insight, enable more informed decisions, and get the best balance of outcomes from their limited resources.

Contractors, like Fortem, have the opportunity to collaborate with Landlords and play a key role in helping them to create and manage their data, and to develop the skills and approaches they need to turn it into actionable  intelligence and deliver the best possible outcomes for residents.

The Power of Intelligent Data in Social Housing

The old adage is that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and this holds true for social housing. Landlords must submit regular data returns across key areas like fire remediation and the Tenant Satisfaction Measures, enabling the regulator to monitor and assess compliance with regulatory standards. Landlords with high-risk of failure or non-compliance are identified, allowing the regulator to increase monitoring, undertake an IDA, or even intervene.

Generating this data should equally allow landlords to understand how they benchmark in the sector, and to make informed decisions to drive their performance. However, 2023 Ombudsman research found that 82% of landlords reported difficulties accessing critical reports, and 75% had issues with data storage. This suggests a challenging situation for landlords trying to use outdated or unintuitive systems and infrastructure, and potentially not seeing data as a critical resource to be invested in.

Data becomes intelligent and powerful when it’s accurate, relevant and timely, and flows easily into a consumable format so effort can be focussed on analysis and creating actionable insight. For a landlord this could be identifying where to target asset investment for maximum impact, improving resident engagement, or where and how to improve services so that dissatisfaction and complaints reduce.

Fortem's Role in Supporting Social Housing Landlords

Fortem only serves the social housing sector, and we take our trusted partner role seriously, and see that our success is our clients’ success. Our offering is designed to have a line of sight to the regulatory environment and the standards a landlord must meet, and we aim to deliver insight and services in a way that our clients will see improving outcomes to residents.

We see this working best in strong integrated partnerships built on collaboration, transparency, shared risks, and common goals, and the key to unlocking this is quality data and intelligence. As an example, a repairs partnership using a single trusted view of performance data, can go beyond KPI achievement, and work collectively to improve asset condition, service delivery and the customer journey, reducing both the burden on the service and the impact on residents.

However, to realise the full potential of a data intelligence-driven partnership, we support our partners through an initial data journey, which involves:

1. Ensuring data is verified as error free, consistent and complete

2. Standardising data formats and protocols so it can be easily shared and integrated together

3. Agreeing how each KPI will be measured, from data source to calculation

4. Improving visualization with interactive and engaging dashboards

5. Increasing data literacy with support and training

6. Collaborating through data sharing platforms, with mechanisms to drive data quality and relevance

7. Creating governance to make sure that data is handled appropriately and change controlled

Helping social housing clients to make informed decisions

Being able to assure data quality and reliability is a key step in building confidence in the insight that it can give, so we can work with our clients to ensure a partnership focus on continual improvement. However, the real opportunity comes from working with clients to create a single unified set of data from across the partnership (so both theirs and ours), giving a single version of the truth, and painting a much richer and clearer picture of asset and service performance, and what is impacting and dissatisfying tenants.

This sets whatever service Fortem is contracted to deliver in the context of a landlord’s overall business and recognises the interdependencies that will exist with all aspects of their operation. This then leads to much more informed decisions both within the partnership, but also for the landlord as a whole, such as where to target investment in the poorest performing properties, or where vulnerable customers may need support.

Since the launch of the Consumer Standards, we have been working with clients to align contract KPIs and reporting to the Tenant Satisfaction Measures so our clients can focus on delivering against key regulatory outcomes and we have a line of sight to how we influence them. We have the same ambitions as our clients – to deliver improved outcomes for tenants evidenced through improving scores against the Tenant Satisfaction Measures. Together we are using our data to support intelligent outcomes.

Likewise, in all our workstreams (retrofit, repairs and capital works) performance dashboards are used by all stakeholders to drive end-to-end performance across a partnership, built from a single, unified set of underlying data. As an example, in our repairs service a landlord is likely to be taking calls from tenants to log a repair, and their ability to diagnose a repair accurately is a critical enabler to our ability to send the right resource with the right materials and tools, at the right time, to do the job right first time, which is in everyone’s interests.

Taking a partnership perspective allows a collective focus on improving the diagnosis rate and driving overall performance. Monthly performance reporting should go beyond contractual KPI adherence, and include a customer lens so that the impact of service delivery can be reduced, and their satisfaction actively increased, all driving towards improved performance against the consumer standards. These reports also provide the foundations for the quarterly strategic reviews for more in-depth analysis and recommendations on areas like target investment to reduce repairs, silent properties, other areas of customer service improvement. Again, collaborative working to make improvements to service.

Conclusion

As social housing faces increasing challenges, the role of data and insight becomes ever more critical. Fortem is committed to supporting landlords by not only providing excellent service but also helping them harness the power of intelligent data. By focusing on data quality, collaboration, and innovation, Fortem aims to help landlords make better decisions, improve asset performance, and ultimately deliver better outcomes for tenants. The future of social housing will depend on leveraging technology and building strong partnerships to meet the growing demands on the sector, and Fortem is ready, even excited, to be playing its part.

The role of data in social housing in the UK cannot be overstated. It empowers housing providers to make informed decisions, improve tenant experiences, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure compliance with regulations. As technology continues to evolve, leveraging data-driven solutions will be key to addressing the housing crisis and creating a more sustainable, inclusive, and efficient social housing sector for the future.

In conclusion, data is not just a tool but a vital asset for the social housing sector. It enables the safety and well-being of residents, enhances accountability, improves service delivery and supports compliance with regulatory standards. As the sector continues to evolve, the intelligent use of data will be key to managing social housing successfully and creating a safer, more responsive environment for all residents.