Tenants give Renfrewshire Council big vote of confidence

Tenants in Renfrewshire have given their local authority landlord an overwhelming vote of confidence, with 82% saying they are satisfied or very satisfied with Renfrewshire Council’s performance.

The figures are contained in Renfrewshire Council’s ‘report card’ which all registered social landlords have to submit to the Scottish Housing Regulator.

The performance report also found that more tenants than ever before, some 77%, feel that the rent they pay for their homes represented fairly good or very good value for money. This was up from 75% in 2013.

There was 100% satisfaction with the concierge service with everyone rating it very highly. The number of tenants, who had had repairs or maintenance work done in their home in the last 12 months, and were satisfied with the service, was up 19% to a stunning 97%.

There has been a substantial improvement in tenant satisfaction with the standard of their home when they moved in as well, up from 61% in 2013/14 to 92% in 2015/16.

There was also a steady improvement in performance on empty homes which has seen the average time taken to re-let an empty property fall from 63 days in 2012/13, to 42 days in 2015/16.

Councillor Tommy Williams, Convener of Renfrewshire Council’s Housing and Community Safety Policy Board, said, “I am delighted with these results and I would like to commend the staff who work hard to maintain this level of service for tenants.

“It is very gratifying to see that 82% of our tenants are satisfied with the council as a landlord. Our drive to ‘get it right first time’ with repairs is also paying off with more tenants being satisfied with the repairs service.

“Tenants are also feeling better about the neighbourhoods where they live with 88% saying they were satisfied with their neighbourhood compared with 87% in 2013. Anti-social behaviour and rubbish were among the issued raised by tenants as things which bothered them about where they live.

“We dealt with 93% of stage one complaints within the target time of five working days. There was a drop in performance with stage two complaints and we only managed to deal with 46% of these within the target of 20 working days.

“Stage two complaints are those that can’t be dealt with by front line staff and need a fuller investigation and are often much more complicated to resolve.

“The performance report shows improvement across many areas and particularly tenant satisfaction but we aren’t complacent. There are areas where we need to do better and we will work to improve our performance where required.”