Good morning, everyone. Thank you for giving us an opportunity again to present our work to the committee. As I have said before, we very much welcome the committee’s interest in and scrutiny of our work. I believe—I say it often enough—that we are a listening and learning organisation. We are keen to hear our various stakeholders’ views and, wherever possible, we reflect those views in how we regulate.
I am delighted to report the progress that we have made on the matters that we set out in our letter of 5 March. Michael Cameron and I will answer any questions that the committee has on the progress update that we gave you in our submission. Specifically, the committee asked us to highlight progress on the introduction of an appeals process and on our work with the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and asked how we would agree the federation’s policy on entitlements, payments and benefits.
We will go live with the new appeals process on 1 April 2016. Over the coming year, we will work with all our stakeholders, especially tenants and tenants organisations, and landlords and their representative bodies, to develop that process. We will aim to put in place an appeals mechanism that is transparent, accessible, proportionate, independent and cost-effective. We also need to ensure that it is able, and that we are able, to act swiftly where necessary to protect the interests of tenants and other service users—in other words, other customers of social housing.
I am pleased to report to the committee that we are now in a position as a regulator to endorse the SFHA’s proposed model policy on entitlements, payments and benefits. That includes provisions on limiting the personal use by a registered social landlord’s governing body, members and staff of its contractors, with appropriate flexibility in the code. The model policy takes account of the needs of landlords that work in rural and remote communities.
The SFHA has issued the model policy to its members and it hopes to publish the final version later this week. We have proposed that, in working with its members, it emphasises that individual landlords have the flexibility to opt out of parts of the model policy that they feel are particularly difficult to implement given their circumstances, and we have proposed that landlords can adopt different approaches, while of course still upholding the principles and spirit of the model policy and meeting our regulatory standards. We are happy to work with the SFHA on communicating and promoting its model policy.
On other matters, we have had generally positive and constructive responses to our recent consultation on revised regulatory guidance, including that on notifiable events. The committee may recall that we have always said, from the beginning of our existence as an independent regulator, that we would constantly review what we do and that we would, wherever possible, streamline our regulation. We are reviewing the independent analysis of our regulatory guidance and we will publish that independent analysis, along with our response and the final guidance, later in the summer. As I said, the exercise has been positive, helpful and constructive.
I highlight that we are now into the second year of collecting charter information from landlords. The charter has been welcomed, particularly by tenants because of the information that it gives them and the ability that it gives them to hold their landlord to account. In the second year, tenants will be able to look at the start of trend information to see how their landlord not only compares with peers in the sector but has performed over time. That is really helpful. On a high note, I am delighted that our work in collecting the charter data and making it available to tenants and other service users was recognised last week when we won two of the prestigious Holyrood connect awards, which celebrate public sector excellence in information and communications technology.
We would be delighted to answer the committee’s questions.