Delivering effective regulation & Public Service Reform
Our statutory objective: to safeguard and promote the interests of tenants, people who are homeless, Gypsy Travellers and others who use the services of social landlords
What we do:
- maintain the Register of Social Landlords
- monitor, assess, report on the performance of social landlords
- monitor, assess, report on the financial health and governance of Registered Social Landlords
- intervene as appropriate
Since 2012 we’ve continuously improved our regulatory approach to provide high levels of assurance by adopting more efficient and effective mechanisms, including:
- focusing on the most important outcomes
- actively engaging tenants to help us shape regulatory priorities and reporting
- putting landlord self-assurance at the heart of our approach
- increasingly targeting the biggest risks with proportionate regulatory responses
- maximising the public availability of information on social landlords and their performance
- automating many of our processes
As a result we have:
- protected the interests of over 600,000 tenants, nearly a quarter of all households in Scotland, people who are homeless, Gypsy Travellers, and those using the services of social landlords
- empowered tenants to hold their social landlord to account
- steadily improved the performance of social landlords in meeting the standards and outcomes in the Social Housing Charter
- ensured no unmanaged failure of a social landlord in Scotland
- provided sector level insights to inform wider housing policy
- helped to protect billions of £s of public investment in social homes
- maintained the confidence of investors in social housing, helping landlords to borrow over £7 billion to invest in new and existing homes – lenders tell us that confidence means they view social landlords as good investments and lets them lend at preferential rates saving social landlords over £50 million each year – a return of 10x on our level of funding
In achieving these outcomes we meet the aims of Public Service Reform by:
- reducing posts in our structure by 32%, saving around £1.5 million each year
- taking the full suite of services from the Scottish Government Shared Services, with no resources embedded in SHR for these services
- reducing our annual office costs by 80% by moving to progressively smaller offices, now taking space from Social Security Scotland, saving around £280k each year
- taking facilities and estate management services from Social Security Scotland
- sharing our Data Protection Officer with Transport Scotland
- migrating our regulatory systems fully to the Cloud achieving annual savings of £80k, eliminating future capital expenditure, and improving cyber resilience
- building an extensive digital offering, with a secure online portal for social landlords’ regulatory returns and notifications, online open format data on the performance of social landlords and a landlord comparison tool for tenants to compare their landlord’s performance with that of others.
- working with other regulators to streamline regulation wherever possible.
- hosting more of our Board meetings virtually, reducing costs and carbon footprint, and we are reducing the number of members of our Board
These initiatives together deliver a recurring annual saving of over £2 million. Our structure is now lean, with streamlined processes and high productivity. We consistently get the highest level of internal audit assurance, clean external audits, strong feedback on our external communications, and amongst the highest scores in the Civil Service People Survey.
This all means we have only limited potential for more efficiencies within SHR, but we continue to look for ways to do more, including by:
- reviewing our operating model to align this to available resources
- using AI and automation to further streamline our work
- working within the Scottish Delivery Bodies Group on potential collaborations and sharing services