Jeff Learman, director of stakeholder relations at Gas Safe Register, asks the very blunt question: who is better served in their home when it comes to gas safety – an owner-occupier or a social housing tenant?
When it comes to getting access to repairs and maintenance, the social housing tenant should be streets ahead of the owner-occuper.

After all, there is a wealth of legislation, rules and regulations which detail the responsibilities of a social housing landlord, whereas the owner-occupier may never give their gas appliances a second thought until the day they stop working.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of social landlords take their responsibilities seriously and comply with the expected standards. They use Gas Safe registered engineers to carry out work; they perform annual gas safety checks; and they provide landlord's gas safety certificates for their tenants (or at least hold these records and provide them when required).

The basics, and in some cases much more, are being delivered to social housing tenants. But what could be improved and how can we help landlords to do it?

Education

To borrow a phrase from Tony Blair (not always a popular choice I grant you) we have our answer: 'education, education, education'.

Social landlords have a responsibility to maintain gas appliances but could reasonably argue that it is not their responsibility to educate their tenants on gas safety. In an era of stretched resources, many would sympathise with their position.
This is where we come in.

When the Gas Safe Register was launched in April, we knew that one of our major tasks would be to inform the public - not just about the change from Corgi but also about how to keep them gas-safe in more general terms.

To this end, we have taken our message to the public. We have advertised; made consumer roadshows; turned up on TV and radio; and appeared in more than 1,400 newspaper and magazine articles in the last six months.

Our messages have been simple: if you need to have gas work carried out, then look for a suitably qualified Gas Safe registered engineer. There are risks associated with unsafe gas appliances.

While the second message applies to all audiences, we knew that for social housing tenants the situation would probably be slightly different - after all, they don't select the engineer or business that services their appliances.

We had, therefore, to find a different way of reaching this audience, with a slightly different set of messages.

We have always known that one of the most effective ways of reaching social housing tenants was through the channels and networks already used by
housing associations and local authorities.

Our stakeholder relations team have spent the last six months speaking with representatives from across the country and we have spoken directly to thousands of people from hundreds of different organisations, telling them about the change from CORGI and, vitally, telling them about the free support information we have available for their use.

The end result? To date we have supplied over a quarter of a million copies of our information to local authorities and housing associations who have, in turn, passed it on to their tenants.
The material has proved to be so popular that in the last few weeks, in fact even before it was printed, we have had orders for 60,000 of our new mailing insert for tenants.

So if you are a housing association or a local authority, a maintenance engineer of social housing or a manager of housing and you haven't taken up the opportunity to pass on the Gas Safe message, I have a final blunt question for you: Why not?