Tenant Satisfaction Measures: Assurance of Approach

The Tenant Satisfaction Measures

The Tenant Satisfaction Measures (TSM) Standard requires all registered providers to conduct tenant perception surveys to generate and report TSMs annually as specified by the Regulator of Social Housing. TSMs are intended to make landlords’ performance more visible to tenants and help tenants hold their landlords accountable.

The TSM standards consist of 22 measures: 10 management information measures and 12 satisfaction measures. They cover five key themes: keeping properties in good repair, maintaining building safety, respectful and helpful engagement, responsible neighbourhood management, and effective handling of complaints, alongside an additional measure for overall satisfaction with landlord services. All information must be an accurate, reliable, valid to provide a transparent reflection of the performance.

Approach

IFF Research were commissioned to carry out this research in accordance with guidance provided by the Regulator of Social Housing on behalf of Thrive in 2024/25. IFF Research is an independent research agency with extensive experience in gathering robust customer feedback for a wide range of sectors.

Survey design

 The survey design meets the criteria as defined in ANNEX 4: Tenant Survey Requirements. Thrive Housing also included the following additional questions within their survey:

• What could Thrive do to improve? Positioned at the end of Overall Satisfaction
• How satisfied or dissatisfied were you with your most recent contact? Positioned at the end of Keeping properties in good repair
• Taking this into account, was your issue resolved at first point of contact? Positioned at the end of Keeping properties in good repair.
• How satisfied or dissatisfied are you that Thrive are easy to deal with? Positioned at the end of Respectful and helpful engagement
• How strongly would you agree or disagree with the following statement, “I trust Thrive to do what they say they will do”? Positioned at the end of Respectful and helpful engagement
• I’m now going to ask you if you agree or disagree with some statements about Thrive: Thrive provides an effective and efficient service? Positioned at the end of Respectful and helpful engagement
• Have you experienced anti-social behaviour in your neighbourhood in the last 12 months? Positioned at the end of Responsible neighbourhood management.

Please note that a ’Don’t know/Refused’ option was included for questions TP01, TP02, TP03, TP04, TP09 and TP10 for interviews conducted via telephone. This was not read out as an answer option and only used in instances when a customer was unable to select an option from the responses available but wanted to continue to provide their feedback. This prevented interviewers from making assumptions or inferences on the customer’s behalf and enabled these customers to continue with the survey to provide their feedback. When submitting data any ’Don’t know/Refused’ should be removed from the reported base for each of these questions for percentage calculations.

As a result, the TSM survey results submitted may include customers who refused or were unable to answer TP01 but wanted to continue to provide their feedback. This is in line with the introductory text confirming that their data would be included in the data submission to the Regulator. Below is the full questionnaire that Thrive used for 24/25 fieldwork.

Please note that no incentives were given to respondents for completing the survey. Reasons to complete the survey were to help Thrive improve the services they provide to customers, as can be seen in the introduction in the questionnaire. 

The questions can be found here

IFF have achieved:

• 1303 valid responses, excluding don’t know responses to TP01 for LCRA, this exceeds the minimum requirement for LCRA
• 144 valid responses, excluding don’t know responses to TP01 for LCHO, on a ‘best effort basis’ as Thrive LCHO stock size is less than 1,000

We consider that a respondent who has terminated an interview has effectively withdrawn their consent to participate in the research. We appreciate that this is open to interpretation, but we take the most cautious approach to uphold our ethical standards. We do include partial responses, where customers have skipped or refused to answer any questions but have submitted their interview.

Methodology

The TSM survey was conducted on a monthly basis from 5^th April 2024 – 12^th February 2025.

All surveys were conducted via telephone interviews, this was to facilitate continued and comparable trend with an existing customer satisfaction programme. Telephone numbers are the most accurate contact information (with the exception of address) held by Thrive so agreed that this methodology would be most appropriate. This also aligns with what we know about the most common channel preference amongst customers.

 

Sample Size

The required sample sizes are shown in the table below (according to Thrives Statistical Data Return 2024 and the latest population data provided by Thrive in February 2025):

Tenure type	Population	Confidence interval required	Number of interviews required per annum for submission	Number of interviews completed (including don’t knows at TP01)
Low-Cost Rental Accommodation (LCRA)	4538	+/- 4%	530	1316
Low-Cost Home Ownership (LCHO)	672	N/A – best effort basis	244	152
Total	5210		774	1468

 

Thrive is required to complete a minimum of 530 surveys per annum among LCRA customers to meet a +/-4% confidence interval.

As Thrive has less than 1,000 LCHO stock, it is not compulsory to conduct this survey and report the findings to the regulator for LCHO customers. However, the Regulator recommends that LCHO and other customers are still offered an opportunity to provide their feedback. Therefore, Thrive have included LCHO customers within this research.

As a result, IFF recommended surveying up to 244 LCHO customers per annum, working on an estimated 30% response rate. Thrive does not need to report these survey findings to the Regulator, but they should still make the results publicly available to their customers.

A quota sampling approach based on agreed characteristics to represent the profile of the full customer population. Quotas were set for:

• Age
• Stock type

Representative Sample

 The Regulator requires providers to ensure, as far as possible, that the survey responses used to calculate the perception TSMs are representative of the relevant tenant population. The sample needs to be representative otherwise perception measures will be biased estimates of the satisfaction score for the relevant tenant population. Providers can meet this requirement through one of two routes:

1. A representative sample: This means there is no material under/over-representation of tenant groups (compared to the relevant tenant population) that is likely to affect calculated satisfaction scores.
2. Weighting responses: If the achieved sample is not representative of the tenant population then providers must appropriately weight the responses to ensure the TSMs reported are representative. Providers must reach a balanced judgement as to which characteristics to include in an assessment of representativeness based on their particular tenant profile, evidence or rationale for potential different satisfaction scores by characteristic, and available data.

The table below summarises the review carried out based on the demographic information available and the representativeness of the survey results.

Based on the review we are satisfied that the sample population and TSM results accurately reflect that of the full customer population.

The survey profile of each available customer demographic compared with the population profile can be found here