Scotlands’s Housing Network shares most comprehensive Charter Performance Data

Scotland’s Housing Network is the largest benchmarking network for social housing landlords in Scotland. Through their bespoke Business Intelligence tools, the Network will today make available to its members the most comprehensive dataset on Charter Performance for 2023/24 available at the present time.

These tools present Charter and EESSH data from 118 landlords, representing around 70% of Scotland’s social housing sector, and will allow landlords to get an early indication of how their performance compares to their peers, as well as to understand wider sector trends. An initial review of the data reveals evidence of the challenges currently facing the sector and demonstrates that the social housing sector continues to respond well to adversity.

In the context of Scotland’s ongoing Housing Emergency, we can see that there has been an increase in the proportion of lets to homeless households amongst both local authorities and RSLs. Nevertheless, this has been tempered by further reductions in turnover making it more difficult for the sector to meet emerging needs.

Relet times were a significant challenge for many in the sector last year, and in this context the overall divergence between local authorities and RSL’s with regard to relet times continues. While many local authorities have seen some improvement in relet times, on average LA relet times continued to increase while RSL’s on average are seeing reductions bringing them closer to pre-pandemic performance.

Social landlords have also supported their tenants through a cost of living crisis in recent years, and despite this this year most landlords who have provided data so far have seen some improvement in their rent arrears performance, although some have generally been relatively modest.

With regard to property condition, we can see that SHQS compliance has continued to improve for both local authorities and RSL’s, while landlords continue to make progress on energy efficiency standards – no mean feat in the context of rising labour and material costs.

The ARC data is now available on our website for members to view.