RWAP Services: Proof Reading, Technical Author and Testing Services

Helping RSLs to Complete NROSH and the RSR

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Background
Every RSL (Registered Social Landlord) knows of their responsibilities to the Tenant Services Authority for filing their regulatory returns. For many years, this has been the annual self-assessment statement of compliance and the Regulatory Statistical Return (the RSR). This data is then utilised, together with financial reports, by the Tenant Services Authority as their main means of assessing their regulatory judgement.

From March 2010, RSLs will need to be submitting data on all of their housing stock direct to NROSH (the National Register of Social Housing), which will help to populate the RSR. With the wide range of housing systems and toolkits to feed the data back to the Tenant Services Authority (and plans to change the reporting system following another tender in December 2009), it can be a nightmare trying to understand the requirements for NROSH and matching your own housing database to their system.

What RWAP Services Can Offer
With 5 years experience of working in the housing sector, 22 years of working in the computer sector, and 6 years experience of working in the legal sector, RWAP Services are able to bring together legal and governance expertise, with ICT and analytical skills to help ensure that RSLs meet these requirements.

We will provide an audit of your systems, matching your existing data to the NROSH specifications and clarify inconsistencies in your data, cleansing the data where necessary. We can then advise on reporting systems and how to utilise the NROSH reporting system to verify the data which you submit, and investigate any discrepancies between the data submitted and the NROSH reports to provide you with confidence that you are meeting all regulatory requirements.

Deadlines are now becoming tight, as RSLs are expected to submit their NROSH data to the end of March 2010 and then quarterly, showing stock movements and current performance of their stock, especially aligned to monitoring by the regulatory bodies of the RSL's compliance with the need to ensure all stock meets the Government's Decent Homes Standard by December 2010.

Case Study
We successfully worked with a Staffordshire-based Housing Association, to implement NROSH reporting, using the Fusion reporting system to report directly from their MIS Active-H management systems.

Prior to the commencement of the project, many of the asset addresses on their databases were inaccurate or missing details, and a variety of information systems were used across the organisation to hold asset details (including spreadsheets and books).

We planned the project for the implementation of the NROSH reporting system, starting with cleansing of the asset addresses in order to submit the mandatory fields by the end of March 2009. We then cleansed the tenant contact data and matched current systems to the NROSH field requirements, clarifying where definitions were not particularly clear. We then identified the extra fields would need to be created within the Active-H housing management system in order to hold all of the data centrally and amassed all of the data into a format which could then be imported into the system by their IT department.

We then wrote the report to retrieve the data held on the NROSH system against the housing association, so that this could be compared and further issues corrected.

Our service to the housing association did not end with NROSH - we also created continuous improvements to their annual Self-Assessment Statement of Compliance resulting in an excellent rating by the Tenant Services Authority during 2009.