Consumer Standards

The Regulator of Social Housing introduced new Consumer Standards for social housing providers like Ongo.

The Consumer Standards aim to ensure that you have a safe, secure and well-maintained home with clear communication and support from your landlord.

 

There are four key standards, plus the Tenant Satisfaction Measures:

  • Safety and Quality Standard

  • Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard

  • Neighbourhood and Community Standard

  • Tenancy Standard

We welcome the new standards as they provide greater rights and protections to tenants and help to improve the quality of social housing and the service tenants receive.

How we’re supporting the new Consumer Standards 

  1. We held workshops to consult with staff and Community Voice (our main tenant body) to identify any areas of non-compliance against the standards and also areas for improvement.
  2. We then created an action plan to capture any improvements needed so that progress can be tracked. No areas of non-compliance were identified.
  3. The self-assessments and the action plan were then shared with our Board for discussion and challenge.
  4. We’ll aim to deliver all the actions within our plan within 12 months, some within two or six months, depending on their urgency.

Our Consumer Standards action plan

OngoPhotograph by Richard Walker/ImageNorth

Safety and Quality Standard

This standard is about making sure Ongo is providing safe, well maintained, safe and good quality homes and landlord services to our tenants.

As part of this standard, we will look to:

  • Review and improve the way you report damp and mould to us.
  • Share information about planned works more proactively.
  • Improve the repairs customer journey, including keeping you informed throughout the repairs process.
  • Add Energy Performance Certificates to our My Home app.
  • Add more information about adaptations to our website.
  • Build a new system to manage and track compliance against legally required health and safety assessments in one place.
OngoPhotograph by Richard Walker/ImageNorth

Transparency, Influence & Accountability Standard

This standard is about making sure Ongo is open with tenants, treating them with fairness and respect, so that they can access services, raise complaints when necessary, influence decision making and hold us to account.

As part of this standard, we will look to:

  • Review the customer data we hold, ensuring it’s accurate by asking tenants to update their information more regularly.
  • Promote the range of communication formats available more regularly, including translation services.
  • Continue to ensure all our tenant communications are written in plain language.
  • Continue to consider a range of different communications formats to meet the diverse needs of our tenants.
  • Utilise our Publications Panel to review high-importance tenant communications.
  • Promote a new Reasonable Adjustments policy, made available on our website.
  • Create an area on our My Home app for our Homeless service users to access information digitally.
  • Create an online community for tenants to feed into consultations and reviews more easily.
  • Consult with all tenants to understand ways of improving and tailoring tenancy services, including customer engagement.
  • Review our Customer Charter to align to the new Consumer Standards, making clear the level of service that tenants can expect.
  • Continue to review our webpages, ensuring information is relevant and accurate, liaising with our Community Voice tenant group.
  • Add new information to our website around our tenancy services offer, tenants’ rights, disability and reasonable adjustments, as well as our leadership chart.
  • Publicise an appeals process to property permissions information.
  • Publicise our performance information against the Tenant Satisfaction Measures.
  • Publicise complaints information in every edition of Key News, and share the types of complaints received in our quarterly complaints performance.
OngoPhotograph by Richard Walker/ImageNorth

Neighbourhood and Community Standard

This standard is about making sure that Ongo engages with other relevant parties, such as the Local Authority or police, so that tenants can live in safe and well-maintained neighbourhoods and feel safe in their homes.

As part of this standard, we will look to:

  • Provide more information on our website and relevant policies about our strategic partnerships.
  • Create a Hate Crime policy.
  • Deliver basic ASB awareness training for all frontline colleagues.
  • Publicise that we are a hate crime reporting centre on our website and what this means.
  • Facilitate safeguarding refresher training for colleagues.
  • Continue our support of the White Ribbon campaign.
OngoPhotograph by Richard Walker/ImageNorth

Tenancy Standard

This standard sets out how we should rent homes to tenants, making sure that we do so fairly, and how we look after and end tenancies; supporting tenants to live in their homes for as long as possible.

As part of this standard, we will look to:

  • Promote Mutual Exchange more proactively as an option of support for those wishing to move.
  • Take more action to highlight potential tenancy fraud, including proactive credit and tenancy checks.
  • Continue to explore and pilot services to help tenants to sustain their tenancies.

Take a look at our self-assessments against the Consumer Standards

Read more about the Tenant Satisfaction Measures.

Tenant Satisfaction Measures

Read more about the Tenant Satisfaction Measures.
Read the government's full report here.

Consumer Standards

Read the government’s full report here.
Read our response to the Consumer Standards.

Our latest news article

Read our response to the Consumer Standards.