So tenants have at last been given the power to wield the big stick when their landlord is not performing or delivering the services that tenants want. Or have they?

The Localism Act 2011 built on the principle of co-regulation espoused by the late, lamented Tenant Services Authority and set out the obligations on a social landlord to enable tenants to effectively scrutinise their performance. So that’s it then, isn’t it?

Well, possibly. The last two years has seen a burgeoning of Resident Scrutiny Panels, Mystery Shoppers and Tenant Service Inspectors all trained  to the back teeth and tooled up to the hilt. But when you look a bit closer, it tends to be the bigger and medium sized landlords that have been making all the running. Once the early trend leaders had shown the way, many others followed their example and set up their own version of the formula.

What of the smaller Housing Associations you might ask? What have they been doing to implement co-regulation with its promise of service excellence and glittering awards for the ‘Shiniest Scrutiny Group’ or whatever they are.

The thing is that the smaller landlords don’t have the resources that the bigger boys have to put into developing new scrutiny arrangements and in reality, many of them aren’t doing a great deal of resident involvement activity anyway because it costs too much.

Except that in practice, many of the smaller fish in the pond are much closer to their residents and staff will know much more about their residents because there aren’t so many of them and they are probably in touch with them fairly regularly.

This is a real opportunity for smaller organisations to develop creative options for co-regulation that demonstrate how effective it can be and provide a model for the bigger fish and these may involve joint working across organisations. Some of this is already happening but it isn’t given a high profile because it is not as big and sparkly as some of the schemes the big fish have set up.

If you are a small organisation and you have an innovative scheme in place or you know of one somewhere else, let me know about it and I will try to put together a compilation of good ideas for dissemination among the small fish. You never know, the sharks and whales may even be interested as well.

Email me on: nigel@huntcliff.org.uk