On 13 February the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR) published its new Regulatory Framework which will apply from 1 April this year. The new Frameworks publication follows a consultation with key stakeholders undertaken by SHR.

Much of the existing Regulatory Framework has been retained. However, some key differences include:

• Annual Assurance Statement: SHR has introduced a new provision allowing it to seek assurance on a specific issue in an RSL’s Annual Assurance Statement (AAS). They have confirmed that they will communicate any specific requirement to RSLs in advance of submitting the AAS. The statutory guidance has been updated accordingly.

• Regulatory requirements: SHR has amended relevant parts of the Regulatory Framework to reinforce the requirement to listen to tenants and service users, ensuring that RSLs have appropriate means for tenants and service users to provide feedback and that quick and effective responses are issued. 

• Notifiable Events: SHR has clarified that only the most serious events are notifiable and they have updated the guidance on Notifiable Events accordingly. In a welcome move, they have restated the importance of RSLs being able to discuss notifiable events with their regulation manager. This is significant, as whether an incident constitutes a notifiable event can be difficult to determine, and an informal discussion with your regulation manager can provide requisite clarity on how SHR would view the matter at hand.

A further helpful change in relation to notifiable events is an undertaking from SHR to publish an annual report on the type of notifiable events they receive and what they do with them – this will add context and further clarity to the notifiable events regime and should prove a useful document for senior management tasked with submitting notifications to SHR.

• Regulatory status: having considered moving to 4 regulatory statuses, SHR has decided to retain the current 3: compliant, working towards compliance and statutory action. They have, however, amended the wording in the second regulatory status to make clearer that this is a non-compliant status, as it is under the current Regulatory Framework.

• Significant Performance Failures: SHR has amended the Regulatory Framework to provide greater clarity on when and what constitutes “significant performance failures” that tenants may report directly to SHR. They have undertaken to update their significant performance failure factsheet accordingly.

• Regulatory Decisions: SHR have listened to consultation responses and merged their guidance on how to request a review of a regulatory decision and how to request an appeal of a regulatory decision.

• ARC: SHR has proposed a comprehensive review of the Annual Return on the Charter. They intend to establish a working group of experts and individuals from the sector to consider each indicator in the ARC and develop appropriate indicators for tenant safety, e.g. in relation to damp and mould and indicators for the Social Housing Net Zero Standard.

• Statutory Guidance: SHR has made various updates to other statutory guidance, primarily to reflect changes in legislation and SHR’s experiences in terms of regulation since the current framework was published in 2019.

Overall, as SHR has said, the new Regulatory Framework is not significantly different than the existing one, but the amendments to guidance and language seek to provide greater clarity for RSLs in certain areas. If you have any queries regarding compliance with the Regulatory Framework or the statutory guidance, please contact our team.