General Notes to Using the Tenancy & Estate Management Standards92

Authorities using this template output specification should note the following:

•  There are two versions of this Annex - one is intended to apply to General Needs, and the other for Extra Care projects.

•  Rent collection is not included within these standards.  Rent collection is wholly the responsibility and risk of the Contractor on non-HRA schemes.  On HRA schemes, the general approach adopted is managed via the Payment Mechanism, whereby a rent collection target (which may or may not also include arrears) is set and to the extent that this is not achieved, the Contractor is deducted sums from the Unitary Charge to make up any shortfall.

•  The following KPIs are drafted with HRA schemes in mind, as it is expected that Authorities will wish to influence service standards to a greater extent as they retain ultimate landlord responsibility.  On non-HRA schemes, the Contractor has greater levels of incentivisation as they are also landlord.  There are some areas where Authorities may wish to review the level of service monitoring it imposes, for example:

o  Tenancy management;

o  Voids (turnaround times, etc.)

•  Some services may not be included within the project and as such should be deleted.  These include:

o  Estate Management Services

o  Leaseholder Services (if no prospect of leaseholders being involved)

•  The performance standards in this Annex represent a general standard derived from previous HRA and non-HRA schemes.  The Authority should review these for appropriateness in their individual scheme, having regard to issues such as:

o  Current performance, and that of peers;

o  Geographical spread of units;

o  Level of incidence against each KPI - low incidence items should be calibrated to prevent overly punitive deductions (for example: if a service has 4 incidences per month, and the MTL is set at 80%, then a single failure in that month would lose the entire value of that service as a single failure would result in a 75% performance).

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92 This page is guidance only for Authorities and should be deleted prior to issue.