On Wednesday 27 November 2024, the Regulator of Social Housing published the outcome of its recent routine regulatory inspection of Notting Hill Genesis, your landlord.
What’s happened
The Regulator of Social Housing sets standards for social housing providers in England. Following a recent routine inspection, the regulator has graded Notting Hill Genesis at level two against their viability standard (V2) and level three against both their governance and consumer standards (G3 and C3).
Our G3/V2/C3 gradings mean that the regulator is satisfied that we meet its financial viability requirements, but that we need to make significant improvements to our governance arrangements in relation to our business planning, risk and control framework, and to our delivery of the outcomes of their consumer standards. Specifically, we need to focus on the regulator’s safety and quality standard.
What happens next
The regulator acknowledges that we are already taking action and have plans in place to address their concerns. We will continue to work with them now to agree a comprehensive and realistic action plan. That plan will build on the foundations we’ve established in recent months and on the progress we’ve made so far through our Better Together strategy
Find out more
We’ve put together a list of questions and answers below based on the queries we expect you might have.
We have a series of regional resident drop-in sessions planned as part of our usual engagement with customers. We’ll ensure someone from our senior team attends each of those to answer any questions you might have about the regulator’s findings. Many of you have been involved in shaping changes to our services and we will continue to offer opportunities to do so.
We will provide regular updates in Connections, our resident bulletin. We send out an electronic version of Connections every other month and produce hard copies twice a year for those of you who prefer not to receive news via email.
If you have any immediate concerns about safety issues in your home, please contact your local officer on their usual number or report it via My Account. You can also call our customer service centre on 020 3815 0000.
Thank you for reading this update and for your understanding as we continue with our plans to provide you all with better and more consistent services. The transformation of our organisation, of the service we provide and of our homes will take time, but we are committed to seeing it through and are confident in our ability to achieve this.
Questions and answers
The regulator carries out programmed inspections of large landlords. They told us in late May 2024 that they would be undertaking a routine inspection of our performance against their economic and consumer standards over the summer of 2024. Our last inspection took place two years ago, so we were expecting a fresh assessment.
Following their inspection, the regulator publishes a regulatory notice setting out their findings. The notice for our most recent inspection was published on 27 November 2024. You can read the notice in full on the regulator’s website at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/xxx
The regulator checked our compliance both against new consumer standards and existing economic standards.
The consumer standards are designed to help ensure that social housing landlords like us provide decent, safe and well-maintained homes and treat their residents with fairness and respect. There have always been consumer standards, but the new set introduced in April 2024 cover more ground and the regulator’s powers to assess performance against them has been enhanced. This includes a proactive assessment during programmed inspections.
The economic standards cover governance and viability, value for money and rent, to check we’re well run and financially viable, make the best use of resources, and set rents in line with government policy.
There are four grades against each criteria – viability (V), governance (G) and consumer (C) – where 1 is the best and 4 the worst. Grades of 1 or 2 mean that an organisation is compliant with the regulator’s requirements while grades of 3 or 4 signal non-compliance. You can find out more about the grades on the regulator’s website.
Before this inspection and judgement, we were graded G1 for governance and V2 for viability. The consumer grading was introduced in April 2024, so this is the first time we’ve been assessed against and given a C rating. We have now been graded V2, G3 and C3.
V2 means that we are meeting the regulator’s viability requirements. We have the financial capacity to deal with a range of different scenarios but need to manage material risks to ensure continued compliance.
G3 means we are not meeting the regulator’s governance requirements. There are issues of serious regulatory concern and in agreement with the regulator, we are working to improve our position.
C3 means that the regulator has judged that there are serious failings in us delivering the outcomes of their consumer standards and significant improvement is needed.
What are the regulator’s main concerns?
For the consumer standard, the regulator has identified specific areas where we need to make more rapid progress, especially around prioritising any safety issues and delivering the outcomes in their safety and quality consumer standard: www.gov.uk/government/publications/safety-and-quality-standard.
- Ensuring legal compliance of external managing agents: We need to improve our understanding of the buildings that are managed by third-party managing agents by increasing the number of safety compliance certificates we hold for such buildings.
- Fire remediation actions: Although the regulator is satisfied that we are proactively managing building safety risks, they are concerned about the volume of non-urgent overdue actions arising from our fire risk assessment programme. All buildings that need one have an in-date fire risk assessment and the average number of actions being completed each month has increased steadily since February 2023, but we need to do more.
- Repairs, maintenance and planned improvements and understanding the condition of our homes: They also expect repairs, maintenance and planned improvements to homes to be consistently completed on time and for us to carry out a higher number of physical assessments to check the condition of your homes and ensure they meet the decent homes standard.
- Handling complaints: For the transparency, influence and accountability standard, the regulator has highlighted a need for us to improve how we handle complaints.
The regulator is broadly positive about our delivery of other elements of the new consumer standards. Their report highlights our approach to allocations and lettings and they are assured that we treat our tenants with fairness and respect and use our data effectively to improve both delivery and access to our services. They also noted that our refreshed approach to resident engagement ensured a link to our governance processes, and that there were examples of tenants’ influence on changes to policies and accessibility of information to residents.
The regulator’s concerns around our governance relate mainly to our processes for managing risk. The regulator also advises that our group board needs to have better oversight of how we comply with health and safety requirements.
As with the consumer standards, the regulator recognises that we are already taking action and have plans in place to improve how we address these matters. That includes the creation in summer 2024 of a new leadership role at executive board level to take responsibility for governance and risk. That role will be filled on a permanent basis from April 2025 and is being covered by an experienced interim appointment in the meantime.
The regulator’s report additionally notes that we had already identified that improvements were needed to our risk management framework and have started work to address that. Once completed and fully implemented, the regulator states that those improvements will support the board to evidence that it has sufficient oversight of the management of strategic risks.
We need now to continue with those improvements to return to regulatory compliance against the governance standard.
On viability, the regulator is satisfied with our financial plans. Their report states that we have an adequately funded business plan, sufficient security in place, and are forecast to continue to meet our financial covenants under a reasonable range of adverse scenarios.
All buildings that need one have an in-date fire risk assessment and the average number of actions being completed each month has increased steadily since February 2023 when we introduced a new plan to improve our completion rate.
The plan is working although we still have much to do. In 2023/24, we closed 61% more fire safety actions than in the previous year. That progress continues, with a specific focus on open actions in our high rise and supported housing buildings.
Find more information about what we do to keep you safe and how you can support us with that work.
Our Better Together strategy, published in summer 2023, sets out our commitment to working better together for our residents through improved connections, homes and places. Our residents have been involved in shaping the changes we have been making to our services and will continue to do so.
Having listened carefully to resident feedback much of our activity so far has focused on establishing the foundations of a more resident-focused and sustainable way of working. We have restructured our operations functions, which included a significant investment in a new customer experience department and dedicated teams to improve how we manage issues such as service charges, repairs and complaints.
To ensure we can invest to improve your homes and the services we provide to you, we have also temporarily scaled back our new homes programme. That decision means we’ve been able to increase the amount we plan to spend on improvements for you, our current residents, from £500 million to £770 million over the next 10 years. We are confident that this investment will provide you with safe, warm and comfortable homes.
These are significant changes and we still have a long way to go to improve your experience, but I am confident our new processes and increased investment will, over time, deliver a considerably better service.
We will work constructively with the regulator to agree a comprehensive and realistic action plan to make the required improvements, building on the foundations we’ve established in recent months and on progress we’ve made to date.
Some of the key areas of work relating to specifically to our residents include:
- Ensuring legal compliance of external managing agents – we have put in place dedicated resource who will continue work to obtain any outstanding documents from external managing agents, so we can be assured of the health and safety of residents who live in homes managed by such agents.
- Fire remediation actions – we have a backlog of fire remediation actions. Work to address them has accelerated and we have a plan and resourcing to clear this backlog.
- Repairs, maintenance and planned improvements – we are investing record amounts in our homes and have created a new centralised repairs service. We are confident you will notice a significant improvement over time.
- One of the regulator’s concerns was that we are not completing physical assessments (stock condition surveys) of our homes as quickly as we should be, so we need to step up activity around that. We will let you know when our surveyors are due to visit your home to carry out those checks.
- Listening to our residents – we have invested £1m in a new centralised complaints service as part of a wider new customer experience team, which we are confident will deliver a material improvement in outcomes for you.
Better Together is a three-year plan, on which we started work in summer 2023. We will work now with the regulator to review our plan and identify how to speed up priority actions around safety inspections, repairs and home improvements.
Our new gradings do not affect any of our services to you nor the communities in which we work. Our day-to-day services to you will continue as normal and we’re going to work hard to make the required improvements. Please continue to report any issues via your local officer or My Account as you do now. You can also call our customer service centre on 020 3815 0000.
We take our responsibilities as a landlord very seriously and are committed to ensuring the health and safety of all our residents. We, or contractors working on our behalf, will contact you if we need to inspect your home for that purpose. Your continued co-operation in allowing our operatives access to your home for health and safety inspections to ensure gas, electrical and fire safety, for example, and for maintenance is both essential and very much appreciated.
One of the regulator’s concerns was that we are not completing physical assessments (stock condition surveys) of our homes as quickly as we should be, so we need to step up activity around that. We will let you know when our surveyors are due to visit your home to carry out those checks.
If you have any immediate concerns about safety issues in your homes, please contact your local officer on their usual number or report it via My Account. You can also call our customer service centre on 020 3815 0000.