STAIRs
From April 2027, your tenants can ask how you run their homes.
Social Tenants Access to Information Requirements give tenants of English private registered providers a right that council tenants have had for twenty years: to ask for information about how their homes and services are managed. It is a Regulator of Social Housing standard, policed by the Housing Ombudsman, and the Ombudsman will publish what it decides. It is not a subject access request. It lands on the same desk.
What tenants can ask for
Any information relating to the management of your social housing. Repairs policies. How a contractor was chosen. Damp and mould inspection figures for a block. Complaints performance for an estate. Service charge breakdowns. Decisions taken about a scheme. The request does not have to mention STAIRs to count, and you have to help the tenant make it valid.
What you have to do
- Publish, from 1 October 2026. A publication scheme covering stock management, performance, spending, governance and decision-making, lists and registers, and social housing management. Easy to find, kept current.
- Answer, from 1 April 2027. Acknowledge promptly. Respond substantively within 30 calendar days. Extend only in exceptional circumstances, with the reason recorded.
- Refuse only on the grounds allowed. Over 18 hours of staff time to locate and extract. Repeated or coordinated requests. Information covered by a FOIA exemption. Information that is a third party's, after considering their view. You cannot delete or alter information to avoid disclosing it, and you do not have to create records you do not hold.
Why this is not FOI with a new name
Only tenants and their representatives can ask, so volumes will be lower than council FOI. But the appeal route is the Housing Ombudsman, which runs STAIRs complaints as a separate process outside the Complaint Handling Code and publishes its determinations. A refusal that would have gone unnoticed as a council FOI decision notice will sit next to your damp and mould findings in a public register.
The 18 hour limit is a retrieval estimate, and it has to be defensible. A provider whose records are indexed and searchable cannot credibly claim 18 hours to pull a repairs policy and three years of complaints data for one block.
How we handle it
Triage
STAIRs requests are recognised on arrival and separated from subject access requests, so each runs under its own clock, its own exemptions and its own appeal route. A request that is really both is split.
Register and clock
The case opens with the 30 day clock, the acknowledgement sent, and the scope recorded.
Search and estimate
The system searches your document stores and housing management system for the information requested and records the time it would take to locate and extract. If the estimate crosses 18 hours, the evidence for that estimate is on the case and the officer is prompted to offer a narrower request.
Review and exempt
Each item is reviewed against the FOIA exemption set. Third-party information is flagged for consultation. Decisions carry a reason.
Respond
The response, the covering letter and an evidence pack: what was asked, what was searched, what was provided, what was withheld and under which exemption, and who decided. Built so that if the tenant goes to the Ombudsman, the file is already the file.
What you get
A request handled the way the policy statement says, with a record that shows it, before the first determination is published with your name on it.