What if we had the Right Move of social housing properties?
Our vision is to unlock the potential of property data and give residents ownership of the data so that they can influence decisions about their homes.
This will be a place where tenants or prospective tenants can view, assess, and update information about their property.
They could rate their property for quality, safety, and neighbourhood. They could add photographs showing the best, or, heaven forbid, the worst, things about it. They could provide crowdsourced data about local services or even the performance and resilience of components such as boilers or kitchens.
We could provide the basic details, some of it could come from open data like Land Registry or EPC or post office. In time we could update the profile with safety records.
Well, that’s probably a few years away. But we can start by defining the scope of a database or application.
We need a National Social Housing Database, combining Open Data with Technology Standards. Sector wide, and government-led, this would be the cheapest and fastest way to drive improvement in social housing, transforming the customer experience while reducing costs.
You might think that’s in big hairy goal of a vision! And we make no apologies for that! We have one big hairy set of problems on data at the moment that are damaging our reputation as landlords.
So, our objectives for the Open Data Exchange reflect that. We need to change culture, build skills, and do that thing we all say we’re good at – collaboration!
We aim to stimulate innovation and collaboration through open and shared data. Everybody knows that reliable, real-time data is key to ensuring that homes are safe, decent, and well-maintained.
Our objectives are:
- Use data to benefit tenants, promoting equality, transparency, and accountability.
- Create a comprehensive database of social housing in the UK.
- Improve data literacy, skills, and capabilities by raising standards and learning from others.
If you like our vision, then let us know by signing up to our community mailing list.
Or tell us how you feel by completing our data survey
Over the next few weeks, we will be producing more of these short blogs about the whys and the wherefores. Be the first to hear by signing up for our mailing list.
Steve, Kate, Amanda, and Neil
Share your resources or write a blog about your data experiences in social housing.
We will publish your stories on our Insights page.
We also intend to curate and maintain a page of the most useful resources for data practitioners in the sector.
If this is successful, we may establish a subscription-based channel for buying and selling resources and services.