East Suffolk Council
Tenant satisfaction
About tenant satisfaction measures
The Regulator of Social Housing is creating a new system for assessing how well social housing landlords in England are doing at providing good quality homes and services. This will involve a set of tenant satisfaction measures that social housing landlords must report on. People will be able to use these measures to understand how well landlords are doing. These measures should:
- let tenants see how well their landlord is doing
- highlight areas where the landlord needs to improve
The tenant satisfaction measures will cover all kinds of rented social housing in England. Some, but not all, of the tenant satisfaction measures will also cover shared ownership homes. They came into effect in April 2023.
With effect from 2025, East Suffolk Council use a company named Acuity to carry out our Tenant Satisfaction Surveys. Your views are crucial in allowing us to make any improvements needed and we are grateful to those who have taken part. If you are contacted by Acuity, please continue to help us by providing your views.
Tenant satisfaction at East Suffolk Council
East Suffolk Council has created a performance dashboard for sharing our tenant satisfaction results with our tenants:
We are also reviewing how we engage with East Suffolk tenants and how our tenants are involved in guiding us to improve and develop our services.
Tenant Satisfaction Measures Survey Approach 23/24
At the beginning of the reporting period, April 2023, East Suffolk Council had a total of 4,323 properties. In accordance with the Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) Tenant Survey Requirements, a sample of 528 responses per annum needed to be reached in order to achieve a statistical accuracy of +/-4%.
Paragraph 48 of the Tenant Survey Requirements details that we must ensure that survey responses used to calculate perception TSM’s are representative of the relevant population. We can do this through one of two routes:
- A representative sample
- Weighting responses
Based on these confidence intervals, Stock Type and trying to achieve a representative sample of +/-4% overall, East Suffolk Council needed to achieve 492 General Needs responses, and 36 Retired Living responses per annum.
East Suffolk Council received 650 total relevant responses in the year April 2023 – March 2024, achieving total statistical accuracy of +/-3.5% over our General Needs and Retired Living properties.
Our previous provider, TPTracker, surveyed the tenants online (email/SMS) and/or phone in order to achieve the required number of responses. The questionnaire comprised of the 15 TSM questions, and East Suffolk Council included some additional questions.
Every relevant household were available to contact unless they had specifically requested that they did not wish to take part in surveys. Each month a random sample of the population were selected to take part in the survey. The provider used survey fatigue controls to ensure that the same household was only included and contacted in a programme once per 12 months.
Production
Email/Online Version
Emails with a link to the online version of the questionnaire, were sent through the provider’s software. Each person was emailed or, if they didn’t have email, texted an individual link to the survey portal. Once they had responded online this would be recorded in their communication and participation records in the provider’s database, and they would be unable to take part again using this link.
Phone Survey
All phone surveys were carried out by the provider’s in-house survey team. If a tenant had responded via the online link, they were removed from the phone list so that surveyors did not call them.
If the provider was unable to contact a person because a mobile or landline number was unavailable, they had neither an email address, nor mobile number, this would register that they had not received the questionnaire. We are assessing the best ways to engage with our tenants to ensure that there is a communication stream available that is accessible to all tenants.
An incentive of a £25 love to shop voucher was sometimes used on phone calls to encourage tenants to take part in the perception survey. The email and online portal landing page all disclosed the possibility of winning the voucher, saying:
Without affecting the confidentiality of your answers, we will be entering everyone who completes the survey into a monthly prize draw to win £25 of love to shop vouchers.