Sustaining tenancies: Measuring performance

Abstract

This is the second of two related papers prepared for the Social Housing Regulation Review panel, on the topic of social housing tenancy sustainment. In the first paper (Sustaining tenancies: Issues and challenges for social housing providers) we canvassed a range of issues relating to social housing tenancy sustainment: why it is important, and why our current understanding of this topic is constrained. In this paper we address two specific questions. The first is what might a tenancy sustainment standard look like? The second asks what data would be required to effectively measure performance against that standard? At one level, thinking through these questions is a hypothetical, “blue sky” exercise, because an official tenancy sustainment standard does not exist for Victorian social housing. But at a deeper level, thinking through these questions requires an acknowledgement that an implicit tenancy sustainment already exists, but not by design. This standard is a public fiction of equal probability of tenancy sustainment and a private set of unequal consequences. The implicit standard exists along with an unnecessarily sparse set of data with which comparisons between social housing providers are always difficult. Neither the implied tenancy sustainment standard, nor the data, are ideal or even particularly desirable, but they have an impact. In this paper, we describe the current, implicit tenancy sustainment standard in Victorian social housing, and the data currently available. We also describe a hypothetical but preferred tenancy sustainment standard, and the data that would be required to effectively measure performance against it. While we are under no illusions that an infallible tenancy sustainment standard is attainable, we also consider that a better one could be achieved than that which currently exists by default. Specifically, we consider that a tenancy sustainment standard should and could be an accessible, consistent, and reliable set of information which allows social housing providers to determine: 1. Whether they exceed or fall short of expected probabilities for a) tenancy sustainment, and b) avoidance of unfavourable tenancy exit, based on a general baseline derived from data contributed by a wide pool of social housing providers; 2. Whether they exceed or fall short of the proportion of tenants with low tenancy sustainment probabilities, in comparison to other social housing providers; 3. Whether they exceed or fall short of expected probabilities for a) tenancy sustainment, and b) avoidance of unfavourable tenancy exit, relative to the profile of their tenancy base