As a member of the Scottish Government’s Temporary and Supported Accommodation Housing Benefit Subgroup, SHN has agreed to lead a short-term project working with homelessness and benefits practitioners to develop agreed guidance on the definitions of temporary accommodation for the purposes of housing benefit calculation to guide future decision-making.

For more information, please contact Tim Pogson.

With some financial support from the Scottish Government we are providing a support sevice to all social landlords in Scotland to help them mitigate for the impact of Welfare Reform.

Outputs from this project are publically available and can be accessed via this link to our Welfare Reform area.

This new forum was launched on 30 September 2014.  As well as holding regular dedicated Forum meetings, the HRA Support Service, which is part-funded by Scottish Government, will also be producing self-assessment resources to support improvement of HRA management, and also resources to support customer engagement with HRA decision-making and communication.

If you would like further information on this service or to join the mailing list please contact Tim Pogson.

We have delivered some successful training sessions on enforcement powers in the private sector.  This training aims to assist housing professionals who work with private with private owners, provide a working knowledge of enforcement powers and the Tenement (Scotland) Act 2004.

This training session can be tailored and delivered to your team.  For details, please contact Liz Dickson.

Social landlords now have to report on the outcomes of tenant surveys. Eight of the sixteen Charter indicators will be monitored through survey responses. Within the next three years of ARC reporting, all landlords must have completed a large scale survey of tenants and service users.

We supported its members by providing free training on large scale surveys delivered by the consultants who were responsible for the Scottish Housing Regulator’s Conducting surveys of tenants and service users – a guide, Steven Hope of Ipsos Mori and Mandy Littlewood of Mandy Littlewood Social Research and Consulting.

The course covered everything from survey planning, to sampling, survey design, fieldwork and analysing and reporting on the survey results.

We are currently working on developing new governance indicators so that we can establish a system to allow RSLs to annually benchmark governance effectiveness in Scotland.

The Charter has placed an even greater emphasis on good governance and clearly sets out it expectations in the Regulatory Framework.

For information on this project, please get in touch with Misia Jack.

In 2010/11 we were commissioned to facilitate 4 Action Learning Sets as part of the national Learning Networks funded by the Scottish Government.

The summary reports from each set are publicly available and copies can be downloaded below.