Our Standards

Our housing stock

In relation to our houses, we take account of the Scottish Housing Quality Standard (SHQS), which was introduced in February 2004. The government uses it to measure housing quality. Houses are assessed on five main criteria and each assessment looks at 55 different elements and nine sub-elements. The intention is to ensure that no property should fall below the standard and Councils and Housing Associations are expected to bring their homes up to the required standard – if, of course, they don’t already meet it – by April 2015.

In fact, Hjaltland Housing Association has an excellent record of working with several local architects to provide high quality housing. We have won several design awards over the years. One early winner of a Saltire Society award, in 1982, was John Jamieson Closs in central Lerwick. Much more recently, we were delighted to receive further Saltire Society Awards for Grodians and Da Vadill, both in Lerwick. These two developments have also collected further awards from the Inverness Architectural Association. These developments were designed by Richard Gibson Architects in Lerwick.

Our services

We aim to offer excellent housing management. As our tenant, we want you to receive a service that’s responsive to your needs. For example, we want your house to be of the right size for your requirements, we try to ensure that you have all the advice you need to get the best from it and we want to undertake repairs according to a clear system of priorities. You can read about our allocation policy and our approach to repairs on this website and we also offer a great deal of other information, for example about insurance. We have a simple complaints procedure, should you feel that we haven’t met our standards.

Your tenancy agreement sets out what you can expect of us and what we expect of you. You can find more information in your copy of the Tenant’s Handbook.