Why now is the right time to invest in fixing tenant engagement gaps in housing

Every year around this point in the financial calendar, housing teams start looking at end-of-year budgets and asking the same set of questions: What needs topping up? What needs deferring to next year? What actually moves the needle before the next financial year starts? And what needs to go into our plan for next year so that we’re achieving our outcomes?

Traditionally, that money goes into repairs, maintenance, health and safety, or areas where compliance deadlines loom. And no doubt these are important things to spend on, but there is a noticeable shift happening across the sector right now. Tenant engagement is moving up the priority list, not because it is suddenly fashionable but because the scrutiny around it has changed.

Between new expectations from government, increasing regulatory focus around transparency, and a resident base that expects to be listened to, the housing sector is investing its spend, especially if there’s a little extra end-of-year budget available, somewhere different: engagement, insight and communication. Why? Because it has huge potential to impact trust and relationships with tenants on a much broader and long-lasting scale.

This is what I am hearing consistently from housing professionals through the conversations I am having, and it has consequences for how budgets are used in the next three months, and beyond. So, here are my thoughts on why now is the ideal time to spend on engagement and what it could do for your organisation. 

The sector has always talked about engagement, but the definition has evolved. Today, engagement is tied to three forces that did not used to be as connected.

1. Compliance
   New expectations around safety and transparency mean engagement is now being monitored rather than just encouraged.
2. Reputation
   Residents have more public ways to express dissatisfaction, from local forums to Trustpilot to neighbourhood Facebook groups. That affects brand, media coverage and political pressure.
3. Service improvement
   If you want evidence-based decisions around repairs, neighbourhood management or customer service, you need insight from more than the loudest few voices.

Regulatory shifts have made this more obvious. Awaab’s Law strengthened the link between safety, repairs and accountability. Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSMs), introduced by the Regulator of Social Housing in April 2023, assess housing providers across areas including:

• Safety and Quality
• Complaints Handling
• Repairs
• Neighbourhood Management
• Communication and Engagement
• Respect

These are not obscure metrics. They are the mechanism by which performance will be judged and compared. You cannot improve communication and engagement scores without actually communicating and engaging, and you cannot improve complaints handling without understanding why complaints happen in the first place.

None of this automatically forces big systemic change, but it does change how decisions get made internally.

Most housing association teams I speak to say they communicate a lot already. And they do. Newsletters, text alerts, targeted campaigns, drop-ins, surveys and community events have been the main tools for decades.

The gap now is not communication. It is listening.

The latest Tenant Satisfaction Measures results make this clear. On average, 75% of residents say they are satisfied with the overall service they receive from their landlord. Most also feel treated fairly and with respect, with results showing over 80% agree with this, and 74 % feel their landlord keeps them informed about things that matter.

But the picture changes when you look at listening and complaints. Only 66% of residents feel their landlord listens to them and acts on their views, and only 39% of people who made a complaint were satisfied with how it was handled, even though 94% of complaints were responded to on time.

Source: National Housing Federation, Tenant Satisfaction Measures 2025 overview.

These results paint a clear picture. Communication is happening, but listening and action are where trust is either built or lost.

There is also an uncomfortable reality many people acknowledge privately: a big percentage of tenant feedback comes from a very small group of highly engaged or highly dissatisfied residents. The vast majority do not attend meetings, do not fill out surveys, and do not escalate complaints in a formal way.

But their perceptions still matter. They show up in TSM scores. They show up in social media sentiment. They show up when journalists or councils ask questions. And they show up when repairs teams see patterns on the ground before anyone else has seen the data.

This is why engagement is starting to be seen less as an add-on and more as a risk reducer and insight tool.

Tenant engagement has not historically been funded in the same way that repairs or safety have. It is often seen as a cost centre, not something that prevents costs elsewhere.

But more teams are starting to see engagement as preventative spend, especially in three areas.

1. Reducing escalated complaints
   Complaints that reach ombudsman level or escalate publicly are expensive both financially and reputationally. Early feedback loops reduce that.
2. Improving TSM performance
   You cannot close gaps you cannot see. Listening to more tenants helps you understand why scores dip or improve.
3. Informing operational priorities
   If repairs teams are seeing mould issues in certain areas, but surveys are not capturing it, something is missing.

This is why end-of-year budget can be useful. You do not need a huge transformation programme to make meaningful progress. Sometimes small spend items make the difference between guessing and understanding.

Examples include:

• Baseline surveys before the new financial year starts
• Tools to capture feedback from harder-to-reach residents
• Digital listening to pick up indirect feedback
• Community sentiment monitoring
• Better workflows between comms, CX and repairs
• Training teams on modern engagement practices

None of this replaces repairs or safety spend, it complements it. And unlike one-off campaign money, engagement spend has a compounding effect, because insight feeds strategy for the rest of the year.

If you work in comms you already know this, but it is slowly cutting through in other parts of organisations: tenant conversations happen online even if your organisation is not looking.

Housing associations are being discussed on:

• Facebook community groups
• Local forums
• Review sites like Trustpilot
• Neighbourhood WhatsApp groups
• Twitter (X) threads, Bluesky and Threads
• Local media comment sections

Some of that is negative, some positive, and most neutral, but all of it is insight. And it rarely makes it into board papers or performance dashboards because nobody has owned it historically.

This is where digital engagement platforms, online listening tools and solutions like Orlo’s Voice of the Community approaches are starting to appear. Not as marketing software, but as customer insight infrastructure. The associations that are investing in this are doing it to understand communities better, not to tick comms boxes.

From what I am seeing across the sector, the leaders tend to do three things well.

1. They make feedback easy
   They do not rely solely on town halls, formal surveys or complaints. They meet residents where they already are.
2. They share insight across teams
   Comms, customer services, digital, repairs and neighbourhood teams all have fragments of the same puzzle. Joined-up teams see the full picture.
3. They close the loop
   Residents do not just want to be heard, they want to see that feedback has influenced something. That is how trust forms.

You don’t need a huge budget to do any of those, but you do need to decide they matter.

If you are reviewing end-of-year spend right now, the organisations making the most progress are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones investing in:

• Understanding what their residents actually think
• Building two-way communication rather than broadcast
• Reducing the insight blind spots that affect TSM outcomes
• Moving from reacting to predicting

It’s early days, but there is a clear pattern emerging: the more you know about your communities, the easier it is to prioritise for the next financial year.

There are some excellent resources emerging from government, the Regulator, HouseMark, CIH and inside the sector on tenant engagement, TSMs and regulatory expectations.

FOr practical guidance on the TSM and regulatory expectations, see the official GOV.UK Tenant Satisfaction Measures collection and the Transparency, Influence and Accountability Standard. The National Housing Federation and HouseMark also publish sector analysis and insight on TSM trends and customer experience.  

If you are in housing comms or customer services, it is worth keeping an eye on how quickly the engagement landscape is shifting, especially as scrutiny increases and transparency becomes the norm. I’ve no doubt that you are! But as there is so much change, it can be hard to keep up with as well as doing your day job. And that’s one of the things I am here to help with. 

If you want to chat about anything mentioned here, or share what your organisation is seeing on the ground, feel free to get in touch. I am always interested in learning how different teams are approaching tenant engagement.