Tenant Services Authority

The TSA is the regulator for social housing in England . It came into being on April 1st, 2010. This means that, for the first time, all social housing providers like Dale & Valley Homes are regulated by the same authority.

Regulatory Framework

The new regulatory framework for all social housing landlords includes a set of standards that social housing providers have to meet from April 2011. These standards are:

Tenant involvement and empowerment - including requirements relating to customer service, choice and complaints; involvement and empowerment; and understanding and responding to the diverse needs of tenants

Home -including the quality of accommodation, repairs and maintenance arrangements.

Tenancy - standards for allocations; rent and tenure

Neighbourhood and community -meeting tenants needs for neighbourhood management; local area co-operation; and response to anti-social behaviour

Value for money - requires providers to manage their resources to provide efficient, quality services to meet tenants' and future tenants' needs

However the TSA are consulting on proposed changes to the regulatory framework to take effect from April 2012.  The proposed revisions and details of how to comment during the consultation period are all contained in the Statutory Consultation section on the TSA website. 

As part of these standards we were required to produce an annual report to customers. Our annual report sets out how we currently meet the standards and how we intend to meet them from 1st April 2011.

We carried out consultation with customers between June 2010 and August 2010 to establish what service priorities are important to them; this helped us create standards of service. These standards have been renamed as Customer Guarantees following a customer competition in Dale Mail.