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Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee 05 December 2023

05 Dec 2023 · S6 · Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee

Item of business

Scottish Housing Regulator: “Annual Report and Accounts 2022-23”

Michael Cameron Watch on SPTV

I am happy to kick off on that question. Clearly, ensuring that tenants live in safe and warm homes is a critical priority for all social landlords. In December 2022, we wrote to all social landlords with advice on the importance of timely and effective action to respond to any incidents of damp and mould. That is very much in the frame of the requirements around tenant and resident safety. In that letter, we asked all governing bodies of RSLs and all committees of councils to consider the systems that they had in place to ensure that their tenants’ homes are not affected by damp and mould and that they have appropriate and proactive systems to identify and deal with any reported cases of damp and mould. 11:00 Following on from that, we worked jointly with the Chartered Institute of Housing, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers to produce a briefing note to landlords, which we published in February. It was about how to deal effectively with damp and mould problems. The briefing recognises that the issues are complex and can be multilayered and that solutions can include tackling issues with the property, as well as supporting tenants with advice in that regard. The partner organisations that we worked with to produce the briefing went on to run a series of workshops for landlords to disseminate best practice in responding to incidents of damp and mould. Those were incredibly well attended by landlords, which indicates how seriously landlords take the issue. In July this year, we wrote to social landlords to ask them to include in their annual assurance statement a specific statement on their compliance with all tenant and resident safety issues, including damp and mould. They provide that statement to us at the end of October every year. We received all those statements from landlords at the end of October, and we will use that information, including the specific statements on damp and mould, as part of our risk assessment, which we are now delivering. We have also published all those annual assurance statements on our website, so that anyone, including tenants, can see what their landlord is saying specifically about their approach to damp and mould. We will fully analyse that information to ensure that we have as good an understanding as possible of the landlords’ response to damp and mould, but we recognise that it is a critical issue and that we need to go further on data collection. That is why, as George Walker indicated, we are developing a suite of indicators to include in the annual return in the charter, alongside a wider suite of indicators that will focus on other aspects of tenant resident safety. We will consult on that in the coming year to ensure that we have a suite of indicators that is as comprehensive as possible to help us to understand landlords’ responses to any reports of damp and mould. We have asked our tenant advisers, who are tenants who work with us voluntarily to scrutinise landlord performance, to look at the information that landlords are putting out on damp and mould for their tenants. Again, when we have that analysis fully done, we will use that as part of our risk assessment process, and we will reflect any outcomes in the published engagement plans that we produce for social landlords.

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Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee 05 December 2023

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