We use inspections as part of our work to assess providers’ performance against our standards and to inform key parts of our regulatory assessment.

Social housing landlords must meet our standards. We may have an inspection carried out in the main where we believe:

• a provider may be failing to meet one of more standards, or
• the affairs of a provider may have been mismanaged

We will use an inspection to establish whether or not such problems are occurring, and to help us assess if further action is necessary.

The Audit Commission (link opens in a new window) carries out housing services inspections on our behalf.

Because of our new standards for social housing providers, our approach to inspection will need to change. We will work with the Audit Commission in a co-regulatory way to review this and we will publish a joint consultation paper in spring 2010. We expect the new approach to be in place for inspections from October 2010. 

In the meantime, we have agreed with the Audit Commission to use only those aspects of its Key Lines of Enquiry (KLoE) framework that are directly relevant to the standards within the scope of the inspection that we have commissioned.

The TSA will identify the main focus for an inspection and we will tell the provider why we think the inspection is necessary.

The TSA’s judgement will be based solely on the new standards from 1 April 2010.  In practice, this means any aspects of a landlord service KLoE that are not related directly to the standards upon which the inspection is focused will not be used or considered. There will be no new KLoE introduced in this period in relation to the TSA’s standards.

Further information about our approach to inspections can be found in the following publications:

• Section 4 of The Regulatory Framework for Social Housing in England from April 2010
• Guidance Note 9 in The Regulatory Framework for Social Housing in England from April 2010 – Annexes to the TSA’s Regulatory Framework Document