What we will do 2021/22

Introducton
Continuing to regulate during the Pandemic
Planned regulatory & statutory intervention work
Engaging with our stakeholders
Being an effective public body

Introducton

This is a summary of our work plans for 2021/22. We will continue to remain agile and responsive to developments in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic and the easing of restrictions. Here, we have set out the main work we aim to do during 2021/22. We recognise that we may have to adapt to reflect emerging priorities and our capacity.

Continuing to regulate during the Pandemic

We will continue to:

support the Scottish Government and the Social Housing Resilience Group in their coordination of the national response to the pandemic and landlords’ recovery activity;
monitor the impact of COVID-19 on social landlords through quarterly data collection and publication of a dashboard and open data;
use the information from the returns to identify emerging issues and serious risks to tenants, people who are experiencing or are at risk of homelessness and other service users;
provide the Scottish Government and the Social Housing Resilience Group with updates to help in their coordination of the national response to the pandemic;
provide advisory guidance relating to the pandemic for Registered Social Landlords (RSLs) governing bodies; and
publish pandemic related updates on our website and promote these directly to landlords and stakeholders.

Following temporary changes to our Regulatory Framework in 2020 we will revert to normal regulatory return timescales during 2021/22.

Planned regulatory & statutory intervention work

We will:

continue to address the priorities that we set out in our publication “The risks we will focus on”
engage with local authorities and RSLs in line with the outcome of our risk assessment set out in our published engagement plans;
update published engagement plans for all social landlords and the regulatory status of RSLs if circumstances change during the year and we will review the engagement we have with all social landlords in our next annual risk assessment;
oversee statutory intervention cases and publish an outcome report on each after we end intervention;
include annual assurance statements from all RSLs and local authorities as part of our regulatory risk assessments and provide guidance to allow inclusion of an equalities update from landlords;
handle any registrations and de-registrations from the register of social landlords and update our guidance on de-registrations;
monitor and report on landlords’ achievement of the standards for Gypsy/Travellers sites;
participate in local area network meetings to support scrutiny of local authorities;
continue to work with the SFHA, contributing to its review of governance guidance for RSLs;
refresh our pool of tenant advisors; and
scope a future programme of thematic studies.

We will report on:

our analysis of RSL loan portfolio returns and the financial health of the RSL sector;
the risks that we will focus on for our 2021/22 annual risk assessment and the outcome of that assessment; and
landlord performance against the Scottish Social Housing Charter, update landlord reports and our comparison tool.
We will aim to develop and publish new and updated guidance on:
equalities and human rights, working jointly with landlord representatives and other stakeholders;
carrying out governance reviews in RSLs;
tenant satisfaction surveys;
asset management; and
EESSH2 to support landlords to make their first return under the new indicators on 31 May 2022.
We will also aim to publish:
updated factsheets on Whistleblowing, Significant Performance Failures and complaints about landlords; and
updated and new editions of How We Work.
We will respond effectively to:
notifiable events;
significant performance failures;
whistleblowing; and complaints, reviews and appeals.

Engaging with our stakeholders

We will involve tenants, service users and all our stakeholders in our work.

We will:

engage with our National Panel of more than 400 tenants and others who use RSLs’ and local authorities’ services and publish the outcome of this work;
engage with tenants via the Regional Network SHR Liaison Group;
work with our pool of tenant advisors and refresh the membership;
engage with all our stakeholders including the Scottish Parliament, Ministers, Scottish Government, representative groups, investors in social housing and advocacy groups for tenants, people who are homeless and Gypsy/Travellers; and
update and work within our memorandums of understanding with other regulators.

Being an effective public body