Across every tenancy you are chasing, tonight, with the money attached to each answer — and each figure decomposing to the accounts behind it, because an assurance number you cannot open is not assurance.
Rent is the lifeblood. It pays for the repairs programme, the safety work and the people — and how it is collected is now a consumer standards question as much as a financial one.
Which is the part that is easy to miss: a collection shortfall and a consumer grading come out of the same process, run by the same team, on the same week. You do not get to fix one of them at the expense of the other.
Insight
Most arrears reporting tells you a total and a trend. The questions that actually land on a chief executive are structural, and they are asked about the whole book at once.
Tenants and arrears in each stage, the threshold for each rent period stated, and for the discretionary route, which of the four things a court looks for is missing.
Housing Act 1985 s.83 · Housing Act 1988 s.8 & Sch 2
Each requirement evidenced or not, per current tenancy in arrears, and which requirement is the gap. Judged at the point of issue, so it has to be true beforehand.
Pre-Action Protocol for Possession Claims by Social Landlords
Two figures kept apart: where a protected characteristic is recorded, and where the assessment and the adjustment offer both exist.
Equality Act 2010 s.149 · Article 8 proportionality
Every suppressed pound with the legal reason attached, and how long is left to enforce each former-tenant debt.
Debt Respite Scheme 2020 · Insolvency Act 1986 · Limitation Act 1980
Analytics, and assurance
A board assurance number that cannot be decomposed is a number somebody will eventually ask about in a meeting where you cannot answer. Each total here opens onto the accounts behind it, and the rule and threshold that put each one there.
The same property is what lets a third line of defence test the figure rather than accept it, which is the difference between management information and assurance.
Nothing prioritises a tenant by a weighting you cannot see. Every rule is readable and editable by your own team, so a decision about a resident can be explained to a board member, a scrutiny committee or an investigator in the words of the rule itself.
That is an increasingly awkward question to answer with a model whose weightings the vendor treats as commercially confidential.
Thirteen duties change what the product will and will not do — which cases appear, which are suppressed, and what the send button refuses. Inside a moratorium the account leaves the queue. Against a secure tenant, the mandatory ground does not exist as an option.
A compliance badge on a screen is a claim. A refusal is evidence.
Every duty, and the two places it stops short →Three or four significant compliance changes inside a year is now normal, and a system that needs a re-procurement each time one lands is a liability rather than an asset.
Thresholds and rule logic are data your team edits, so most changes are a configuration change made in an afternoon. A genuinely new statutory duty is our work, not yours — and the legal spine is where we do it, in the product rather than in a guidance note.
If the question has already been asked
Where this stops
Worth reading before this is described to a board, because these are the sentences that would otherwise be quoted back.
The Regulator of Social Housing regulates you, not us. We do not use the word about ourselves, and we would be cautious about anyone who does — it is a claim that has to survive an adverse finding.
It shows, per tenancy, whether the evidence exists. Whether that evidence is good enough in a particular case is a judgement for your solicitor and ultimately a court.
No decade of sector comparison data, and no published uplift figure. A pilot on one patch of your own book produces evidence about you, which is the only kind worth taking to a board.
The rest of the committee
Written separately because these are genuinely different questions, not the same pitch with the job title swapped.
One patch, one team, your own data loaded. Tell us your account volumes and which housing management system you run, and we will put a number to it.
Tell us about your organisation and what you are trying to fix. It goes straight to the team, and a person replies.