Landlord services performance
This page contains information on Reading Borough Council’s performance as a landlord and the national standards for housing services which all council and housing association landlords are required to meet.
On this page:
Housing annual report
The Housing Annual Report is designed to keep tenants up to date as to how the council is performing as a landlord and what we are doing in Reading to increase the value we provide to communities.
Housing service standards
Summary of the standards
The Regulator for Social Housing has introduced a new proactive Consumer Regulation regime for registered providers of Social Housing. This includes a refreshed inspection regime, and a new set of Consumer Standards for landlords to comply with.
These standards aim to:
- To support the provision of social housing that’s well-managed, safe, energy efficient, and of appropriate quality.
- To make sure that actual or potential tenants of social housing have an appropriate degree of choice and protection.
- To make sure that tenants of social housing have the opportunity to be involved in its management and hold their landlords to account.
- To make sure that registered providers act in a transparent manner in relation to their tenants of social housing.
- To encourage landlords to contribute to the environmental, social, and economic wellbeing of the areas in which their housing is located.
The standards are below:
- Safety & quality
- Transparency, influence & accountability
- Neighbourhood & community
- Tenancy
Safety and quality standard
This standard proposes that landlords have to provide their tenants with safe, good quality homes and effective landlord services.
- Safe and Well-Maintained Homes: Ensure all properties meet health and safety requirements, including regular inspections and prompt addressing of hazards like damp and mould.
- Responsive Repairs: Provide timely and effective repairs and maintenance services, with clear communication on timelines and processes.
- Quality Assurance: Maintain homes to the Decent Homes Standard, ensuring they are warm, weatherproof, and have modern facilities.
Safety & Quality – Local Offers:
This looks at things like the quality of your home and the effectiveness and efficiency of our repairs and maintenance service. You can expect us to:
- Ensure our staff take a customer focused and proactive approach
- Offer appointments for all work where possible
- Keep our appointments and complete repairs on the first visit whenever possible
- Keep you up to date on our progress if your repair can’t be completed at the first visit
- Give you a minimum of 3 weeks’ notice of any planned maintenance to your home
- Maintain your home to the decent homes standard
- Maintain the outside of you home regularly (typically every 7-8 years)
- Carry out necessary works so empty properties can be relet quickly and efficiently
- Service any gas appliances (fires, boilers, water heaters and cookers) we installed in your home every year and carry out regular electrical checks
Transparency, Influence, and Accountability Standard
- Clear Communication: Offer accessible information about services, performance, and tenant rights, fostering an open landlord-tenant relationship.
- Tenant Engagement: Actively involve tenants in decision-making processes, considering their feedback in service improvements.
- Effective Complaint Handling: Implement a fair, transparent, and prompt complaints procedure, ensuring tenants feel heard and respected.
Transparency, Influence, and Accountability Standard: Local Offers
This includes customer services, giving you choice, dealing with complaints, involving tenants in decisions about your homes and responding to the needs of individual tenants. You can expect us to:
- Encourage tenants to make comments, complaints and compliments
- Review aspects of our services according to feedback and let tenants know if we change the way we deliver services as a result of a complaint (where possible)
- Keep you up to date about what we are doing, how we are doing it and what you have told us (‘You Said, We Did’) using a variety of methods (Your housing, the website, local newsletters and community events)
- Ensure tenants are aware of the opportunities to get involved so that they can influence the services they receive
- Enable you to check and challenge our performance and value for money by supporting tenant led involvement activities
- Offer training to individual tenants and tenant groups so they have the skills and confidence to challenge our performance
- Ensure housing information is clear, free of jargon and easy to understand
- Provide a variety of methods to get involved which are appropriate to the diverse needs of tenants in the delivery of all National Standards
- Provide support to make it easier for tenants to get involved and influence decisions about housing services
- Continue to collect and analyse information about our current and future customers to help us design and deliver services which match customers’ needs and expectations.
Neighbourhood and Community Standard
- Safe Communities: Collaborate with local agencies to promote safe, clean, and well-maintained neighbourhoods.
- Anti-Social Behaviour: Address anti-social behaviour swiftly, working with tenants and authorities to foster a respectful community environment.
Neighbourhood and Community Standard: Local Offers
This includes the things we are doing to manage and improve your neighbourhood and how we deal with antisocial behaviour. You can expect us to:
- Encourage and support events, projects and improvements that benefit your neighbourhood and community
- Inspect estate areas every three months and work with other Council departments to ensure your neighbourhood is clean and well maintained
- Work with other Council departments to remove fly tipping within five days of it being reported to us
- Display the cleaning schedule in your block so you know what should be done and when
- Respond to concerns reported about the standard of cleaning in the blocks within three working days
- Keep you informed on the progress of your antisocial behaviour complaint at least monthly for less serious cases and at least fortnightly for more serious cases
- Provide a mediation service to help resolve neighbourhood disputes
- Offer advice and support to the victims and witnesses of antisocial behaviour
Tenancy Standard
- Fair Allocations: Allocate homes transparently and fairly, ensuring processes are understandable and equitable.
- Tenure Security: Provide clear information on tenancy agreements, rights, and responsibilities, supporting tenants to maintain their homes.
- Support Services: Offer assistance to sustain tenancies, including support for vulnerable tenants and guidance on mutual exchanges.
Service Charges and Affordability
- Transparency in Charges: Clearly outline service charges, ensuring they are reasonable, transparent, and communicated prior to tenancy agreements.
- Affordability Measures: Implement measures to keep housing costs affordable, providing support and advice to tenants facing financial difficulties.
Tenancy Standard: Local offers
This includes how we allocate empty properties to people on the waiting list, the things we do to help build stable communities and supporting tenants to maintain their tenancies. You can expect us to:
- Offer advice on benefits, debt and money management to all tenants
- Ensure vacant properties are clean, tidy and meet the councils relet standard before new tenants move in
- Explain our relet standard and offer you the chance to view the property before asking you to sign your new Tenancy Agreement when you make a successful bid
- Provide advice, including financial advice, to encourage tenants to move to a smaller home if their current home has become larger than they need
- Provide clear and relevant information about rent, service charges and benefit changes
- Continue to offer a range of up to date payment methods (including direct debit, standing orders, internet payments and PayPoint) to make it easier for you to pay your rent on time
- Contact you within three weeks if you fall into arrears to offer you advice and assistance
Continuous Improvement
- Performance Monitoring: Regularly assess and publish performance metrics, using tenant feedback to drive service enhancements.
- Staff Training: Ensure staff are trained to deliver high-quality services, treating tenants with respect and professionalism.
We check we meet these standards by carrying out spot checks & regular inspections, asking for your feedback through interviews or questionnaires and monitoring the complaints we receive.
We report our performance against the standards in our annual report to tenants.
Our Tenant Voices Group will monitor our performance against the standards and TACT, the Tenant Scrutiny Panel, who review and challenge our performance.
If you are interested in becoming an involved tenant, please contact the Tenant Participation Team by calling 0118 937 2730 or send them at email tenant.participation@reading.gov.uk.
When will RBC Housing Services be inspected?
The RSH does programmed and non-programmed inspections on landlords. Large organisations like Reading Borough Council will be inspected at least once every four years. Read more about inspections here.
Helping us to help you
We aim to provide the best possible housing services to you but to do this we need help from you. The main thing that you can do is to meet the conditions of your Tenancy Agreement. This includes:
- Paying your rent on time
- Carrying out the repairs you are responsible for
- Not creating a nuisance or harassing anyone
You can also help us by:
- Giving our trades people access to carry out the annual gas safety check and/or other essential repairs
- Keeping your appointments or letting us know if you have to cancel
- Being polite to our staff
- Telling us if you are unhappy with our service
Tell us what you think
If you are not happy with the service we provide, or you have ideas about how we can do better, or you are particularly pleased with something we have done please tell us as soon as possible. Your feedback helps us improve our services to you.
The easiest way to tell us what you think is contact the Housing and Estate Teams via e-mail H&EServices@reading.gov.uk or by calling the customer fulfilment centre on 0118 937 2161 , or contacting our Customer Relations Team at CustomerRelationsTeam@reading.gov.uk
Tenant satisfaction measures
Tenant satisfaction measures are a recent regulatory requirement.
All registered social housing landlords, including Reading Borough Council must:
- Collect performance data in line with the tenant satisfaction measures from April 1, 2023.
- Annually submit performance results against the tenant satisfaction measures to the Regulator of Social Housing, commencing June 2024.
- Annually publish performance against specified Tenant Satisfaction Measures, from September 2024.
- The tenant satisfaction measures are intended to help empower social housing tenants to scrutinise their landlord’s performance and in holding their landlords to account.
You can find out more about tenant satisfaction measures on the government website.
Tenant satisfaction measures return for 2023 to 2024
TSM – RP01 – Homes that do not meet Decent Homes Standard (percentage)
| Percentage not meeting decent homes | 2.00% |
| No of homes that did not meet decent homes in period | 136 |
TSM – RP02 – Repairs completed within target timescale
| Percentage – Non Emergency in timescale | 82.79% |
| Number of non emergency repairs completed in timescale | 15781 |
| Number of Non emergency repairs completed in period | 19062 |
| Percentage – Emergency in timescale | 98.84% |
| No of emergency repairs completed in timescale | 1867 |
| Number of emergency repairs completed in period | 1889 |
TSM – BS01 – Gas safety checks
| Percentage of gas safety checks completed | 100.00% |
| No of dwellings owned that have received gas safety checks that required them | 4768 |
TSM – BS02 – Fire Safety checks
| Percentage of fire safety checks completed | 100.00% |
| No of dwellings owned that have received fire safety checks that needed them | 385 |
TSM – BS03 – Asbestos Safety checks
| Percentage of Asbestos checks completed | 100.00% |
| No of dwellings owned that have received an asbestos survey that need one | 260 |
TSM – BS04 – Water Safety Checks
| Percentage of Legionella Risk Assessments completed | 95.18% |
| No of dwellings owned that have received a legionella risk assessment that need one | 79 |
TSM – BS05 – Lift Safety Checks
| Percentage of Communal Passenger Lift Safety checks completed | 100.00% |
| No of dwellings owned that have received a lift safety check that need one | 123 |
TSM – NM01 – Anti-social behaviour cases relative to the size of the landlord (per 1000 properties)
| total cases opened per 1000 properties | 23.84 |
| total number of ASB cases opened | 135 |
| total hate crime cases per 1000 properties | 0.71 |
| * of total ASB opened – how many are hate crimes | 4 |
TSM – CH01 – Complaints relative to size of landlord (per 1000 properties)
| No of Stage 1 per 1000 properties | 56.52 |
| No of Stage 1 complaints received | 320 |
| No of stage 2 per 1000 properties | 5.29 |
| No of Stage 2 complaints received | 30 |
TSM – CH02 – Complaints responded to within Handling Code guidelines (percentage)
| Stage 1 – percentage responded to on time | 63% |
| No of Stage 1 complaints responded to on time (by complaint start date) | 202 |
| Stage 2 – percentage responded to on time | 57% |
| No of Stage 2 complaints responded to on time (by complaint start date) | 17 |
Tenant Satisfaction Survey results
| Overall satisfaction with RBC Housing Services | 78% | 82% | 81% |
| Satisfaction with overall repairs service over the last 12 months | 80% | 76% | 74% |
| Satisfaction with time taken to complete most recent repair | 75% | 73% | NA |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services provide a home that is well maintained | 83% | 84% | NA |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services provide a home that is safe | 86% | 88% | 86% |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services listen to your views and act upon them | 73% | 79% | 69% |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services keep you informed about things that matter to you | 81% | 87% | 82% |
| Agree that ‘My landlord treats me fairly and with respect’ | 89% | 91% | 81% |
| Satisfaction with RBC Housing Services’ approach to complaints handling | 36% | 29% | 18% |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services keep communal areas clean and well maintained | 77% | 70% | NA |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services make a positive contribution to your neighbourhood | 79% | 85% | NA |
| Satisfaction with RBC Housing Services’ approach to handling ASB | 68% | 67% | NA |
| Satisfaction that RBC Housing Services give you the opportunity to make your views known | 80% | 84% | 64% |
| Staff at RBC Housing Services pleasant and polite? (Yes) | 95% | 94% | 95% |
| Likelihood of recommending to family and friends – promoters or passive | 78% | 82% | 80% |
| RBC Housing Services has stayed the same or got better in the past year | 85% | 83% | 87% |
Useful contacts
Tenant Participation Team
Telephone: 0118 937 2730
Email: tenant.participation@reading.gov.uk
Tenant Services
Telephone: 0118 937 2161
Email: neighbourhood.services@reading.gov.uk
Housing Services
Telephone: 0118 937 3757
Customer Relations
Telephone: 0118 937 2905
Email: complaints@reading.gov.uk
Housing repairs
Telephone: 0800 318 296
Last updated on 21/03/2025
Landlord services performance