Overview
The survey was conducted on our behalf by Acuity Research and Practice Limited between October 2023 and January 2024.
Read the questions we asked (pdf / 199 KB).
Aims
The aim of this survey was to provide data on tenants’ satisfaction which will allow us to:
- provide information on tenants’ perceptions of current services
- act as a baseline to compare future surveys against
- compare the results with other landlords, where appropriate
- report to the regulator from April 2024 onwards
Responses
At the close of the survey, 2,241 responses had been received from the original tenant population of 8,329. Of these, 1,046 were received online, 600 by post and 595 by telephone interview.
Sampling
All our tenants were invited to take part in the survey.
The survey used a staged mixed-mode methodological approach. Firstly, those tenants with an email address were sent a link via email to complete the survey online. This was followed by a postal survey (one mailout) to a sample of non-respondents (50% or 3,615 tenants). Finally, a telephone booster survey was undertaken to capture the responses of up to 600 tenants who had not responded.
This methodology was chosen as this was the first time the combined former stock holding authorities of Harrogate, Richmondshire and Selby had undertaken a survey as North Yorkshire Council.
Having now carried the first tenant satisfaction survey we will review participation rates across various tenant sub-groups to ensure:
- no one group of tenants did not take part and look to adopt an approach which will mean contacting fewer tenants each year
- it is more compatible with other landlords approaches to aid benchmarking
Fieldwork
The fieldwork started at the end of October 2023 and eventually closed on 26 January 2024. The aim of the survey was to complete around 2,000 survey responses to exceed the required margin of error and to give as many tenants as possible the opportunity to respond to the survey.
For the overall results, Acuity, Housemark and the Regulator of Social Housing recommend that landlords with under 10,000 properties achieve a sampling error of at least plus or minus 4% at the 95% confidence level.
For us, 2,241 responses were received, and this response is high enough to conclude that the findings are accurate to within plus or minus 1.8%, so well within the required margin and giving good accuracy of results, and these can be said to represent the views of the tenants as a whole.
Feedback
The survey was confidential, and the results were sent back to us anonymised unless tenants give their permission to be identified. 91% of tenants gave permission to share their name and 89% of these tenants are happy for us to contact them to discuss any issues they raised.
The majority of figures throughout the report show the results as percentages. The percentages are rounded up or down from two decimal places in the results file to the nearest whole number and therefore may not add up to 100% in all cases. Rounding can also cause percentages described in the supporting text to differ from the percentages in the charts by 1% when two percentages are added together.
Representativeness
The responses were checked against the tenure, area and age of the tenants to ensure they fully represent the whole population, and it was found that there was very little variation, so no weighting has been applied to the results.