Responsive engagement with landlords
How we engage with landlords, and what further action we may take
Applies to England
Overview of responsive engagement
Where we assess an issue or a potential issue to be material to a landlord’s delivery of the outcomes of our standards, we may carry out responsive engagement with that landlord.
Landlords are required to tell us of any material issues that has or may affect their ability to deliver the outcome of the standards. This is an important aspect of the co-regulatory approach.
Through our responsive engagement, we ask the landlord to provide evidence that it is delivering the relevant outcomes of our standards. Where we have found failures in a landlord’s delivery of the outcomes of our standards, we ask the landlord to provide evidence that it is making sufficient progress and improvements to address those failures.
Our responsive engagement with a landlord may use relevant information from a range of sources, for example relevant information from referrals, programmed inspections, information from notifications or regular reviews of information that we carry out between programmed inspections.
Find out more about
How we assess issues of regulatory concern, including examples of the factors we may use to help us.
We may also decide to seek evidence about a landlord’s delivery of the standards outcomes in other ways, for example including relevant issues as an area of focus in a programmed inspection or carrying out an inspection that is not programmed.
Where we suspect a serious failure to deliver the outcomes of our standards, we may add the landlord to our gradings under review list whilst we conclude our findings. Once we issue our regulatory judgement, we will remove the landlord from the gradings under review list.
Further action following our responsive engagement
Where our responsive engagement with a landlord leads us to form or change our view of how well the landlord is delivering the outcomes of our standards, we may reflect this in our published regulatory judgement and where appropriate grading. We normally continue our responsive engagement with a landlord until it has provided evidence that gives us sufficient assurance that it has addressed the weaknesses or failings. In cases where the landlord does not provide us with evidence that gives us sufficient assurance that they have made relevant improvements we will take what we consider to be the appropriate course of action. In some cases, we may also use the relevant information to help us identify current or future patterns in issues arising with a particular landlord. We may also use the relevant information to help us scope the landlord’s programmed inspection, or we may for example, decide to use our regulatory or enforcement powers.