Thank you and good morning. I am making this statement on behalf of the chair, Kay Blair, and I will convey the committee’s best wishes to her when I see her later today.
I start by expressing my thanks to the committee’s previous convener, Maureen Watt, for hosting the regulator’s important stakeholder reception in the Scottish Parliament building in May last year. Most of us attended the reception, and the feedback that we have had has been very positive, so I thank you very much for that.
In my introductory statement, I will touch on some of the highlights of the past year or so, the value that we add, our engagement with stakeholders and the success of our work on the charter.
Since we last appeared at the committee, we have had a busy, challenging and—we think—successful year. I will go through the highlights. First, there was our planned, risk-based and proportionate engagement with 61 registered social landlords and 15 councils, with the single objective of protecting the interests of tenants and other service users. Secondly, we launched the charter landlord reports and the easy-use comparison tool, which have been well received. Thirdly, we have implemented the new information technology system that allows landlords to submit information quickly and easily to us online.
Other highlights include the publication of our report, “Housing Options in Scotland: A thematic inquiry”; the continued provision of support to RSL board members through our “Governance Matters” events; and the first use of our statutory intervention powers with two landlords, again to protect the interests of tenants. It is through that type of work and our effective regulation that we add value to social housing.
Giving confidence to lenders and investors in social housing is hugely important. More than £4 billion is invested in social housing by private lenders and investors, and one of the major lenders to the sector recently told us that our effective regulation has a value of around 115 basis points, or 1.15 per cent, on lending to landlords. At current levels of RSL debt, that equates to a saving of approximately £40 million every year on the interest charges that RSLs pay. That is a ten-fold return on the cost of regulation, and it is a significant benefit to RSLs.
We also add value in other less quantifiable, although no less important, ways. We empower tenants by giving them timely, accessible and comparable information on landlords’ performance. We help to protect the hard-earned good reputation of those social landlords who provide good service and are well managed. We provide guidance and learning opportunities through our engagement case studies, and we help landlords to improve by providing benchmarking information.
We will build on the success of last year partly by initiating a programme of service-focused thematic inquiries. That will include an inquiry on Gypsy Travellers, in which I know the committee has an interest. We will use our analysis of the data that we collected for the first time through the 2013-14 annual return on the charter from the 20 social landlords that manage Gypsy Traveller sites. Our inquiry will look at the reasons behind significant variances in pitch rents and customer satisfaction levels, and we will highlight good practice that we find and make recommendations on improvement. We expect to publish on that early this year.
We place great importance on communication and engagement with our broad range of stakeholders. We are aware that effective regulation will mean that we are not always popular with all of them, but we value effective, respectful and professional relationships with all our stakeholders. This year, we published independent research into how we communicate, which involved 270 of our stakeholder organisations. It found strengths in our approach, and areas that we can enhance further.
It is important that we work with our principal stakeholders—tenants and service users—to ensure that we understand their priorities. Last year, we published the second report on the views of our national panel of more than 300 tenants and service users, and we conducted separate research into the service priorities of registered tenant organisations in Scotland. We have established formal liaison arrangements with the regional network of RTOs, and we now meet them regularly. Lay tenant assessors also contributed significantly to our work last year. Those engagements help to shape what we do, and we have worked with tenants to co-produce the landlord reports that we published in August.
We know that the committee will have heard a range of views about the regulator, including both praise and criticism. It is very difficult for us to respond to general criticisms, and I am sure that you will agree that effective regulators are seldom popular with those whom they regulate. Indeed, an overly popular regulator may be not be fulfilling its responsibilities and role. Having said that, we are always keen to hear feedback, whether it is positive or negative. We have positive relationships with many of our stakeholders, including lenders, auditors to the sector and many regulated bodies. That is not to say that we cannot improve, and we are always keen to listen in order to help to shape even more effective regulation.
We want effective dialogue to help us to understand stakeholders’ views, and so that stakeholders understand how we work. To that end, we are working constructively with the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Forum of Housing Associations on an information note about how we apply in practice the policies in our regulatory framework on inquiries and interventions. In addition, we are keen to work with landlord representatives to drive good practice and to encourage them to develop mechanisms to enable landlords to better support each other, especially where a landlord is experiencing difficulties. Leadership from within the sector is important, and we would like it to develop even further.
Finally, I will say a little more on the important and empowering landlord reports and online comparison tool that we made available in August. I hope that you have had a chance to look at those and to watch the demonstration video that we provided to the committee. We have received excellent feedback from stakeholders—tenants, in particular—on how they help users to compare and contrast landlords’ performance. We will publish soon an insightful national report on our analysis of the charter, and I will make sure that you receive copies of it.
We are happy to take questions on anything that I have mentioned or on any other matter that you may wish to raise with us.