The KPIs have been developed by members of both organisations over the last year, following the creation of a jointly facilitated working group.

Since the undeniably catastrophic event at Grenfell Tower, social landlords, governments, lenders and most importantly tenants are increasingly aware of the safety concerns in housing. Thinking beyond fire safety regulations, into broader regulatory and statutory tenant safety obligations, and best practice standards, the two leading data specialists have worked jointly with members to combine their knowledge to co-produce the new indicators with representatives from their membership. The KPIs cover areas such as water safety, electrical and gas safety and the LOLER requirements.

Scotland’s Housing Network and Housemark Scotland are now inviting social landlords to submit data for the pilot KPIs by 30 June 2022. The pilot project is open to all Scottish social landlords from 1st April, with the data collection form being returned to SHN by the end of June. Following the initial data collation and analysis by SHN, Housemark will then validate and analyse the data provided.

The pilot exercise will be reviewed and assessed with a view to potentially incorporating them in future into the annual data collection by landlords as part of their Annual Return on the Charter (ARC).

Kirsty Wells, director of consultancy and partnerships at Housemark, said: “It has been a really positive experience to collaborate with staff at SHN and in our member organisations across the country to produce a valuable output for the sector. We hope that as many social landlords as possible will participate in the pilot so that we can measure the ease of data collection, if the definitions are accurate and what the baseline position of the sector is in 2022 in measuring its building safety performance.”

Andrea Finkel-Gates, CEO of Scotland’s Housing Network, commented: “These Tenant Safety Indictors have been developed by the sector, for the sector. I would like to thank the member organisations that worked with SHN and Housemark, it was the efforts of the experts in the field that enabled us to develop these indictors. We hope that the wider Scottish social housing sector will support us in the next stage of piloting the data collection and analysis”

Michael Cameron, CEO at the Scottish Housing Regulator, added: “Tenant safety is a key priority for us, and so we very much welcome this important sector-led initiative. We will work with Scotland’s Housing Network, and Housemark Scotland to assess the effectiveness of the indicators and to consider their possible inclusion in the Annual Return on the Charter.”

The data collection form is available here and should be returned to data@scotlandshousingnetwork.org by 30th June 2022.