The Clarion Index 2024: What our residents told us
Clarion Housing Group has launched Clarion Index, the 2024 edition of our annual customer insight survey.
As the country’s largest housing association, understanding who our 360,000 residents are is crucial to providing the service they need and expect from us. One of the key ways we do this is by asking 2,000 of them every year in a 15-minute survey over the phone. This is the Clarion Index.
During those calls, we ask 60 questions about each resident’s neighbourhood, their job, how they feel their wellbeing is, how they are coping with their finances, what their online lives are like, and their experience of us as a landlord. We also use our questions to plot changes and trends in demographic factors like dependent children, ethnicity, and disability.
The Index offers a snapshot of broader societal changes. In recent years, we have added more questions around the cost of living to understand how our residents are coping with pressures like energy bills and rising food prices.
At a time of increased polarisation more broadly, it’s also refreshing to hear how cohesive our residents feel their communities and neighbourhoods are.
We don’t just collect all of this information to talk about though, we use it to help us shape and tailor our services in the coming years, because the needs of our communities are ever-evolving and we have a responsibility to keep pace.
Clarion Index 2024: Key findings
This year’s Index shows 83% of residents are satisfied with their neighbourhood, and 86% feel they belong in their neighbourhood. On top of this, 81% of residents agree that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together, up from 77% last year.
Over the past few years, we noted an increase in loneliness among residents and Clarion has put in place various initiatives to help address this, including the ‘Lend an Ear’ service and the ‘make every visit count’ campaign. Encouragingly, for the first time the Clarion Index has recorded an increase in the proportion of residents who say they never feel lonely, with the number of residents who often or always feel lonely dropping to 15%. This remains an area of concern, with the general population’s figure for acute loneliness at 7% according to the ONS.
In terms of employment, perhaps most worthy of note is the increase in the percentage of residents who are unemployed and not looking for work due to a disability or long-term illness. This has been steadily increasing from 10% in 2020, reaching 18% this year.
This lines up with another key finding in this year’s Index that 44% of residents report having a disability, a figure that has increased from 35% in 2019.
Finally, our questions around household finances and the cost of living show that, although many residents are still finding things tough, the proportion who are cutting back on household spending, borrowing money or using credit to pay for essentials, and going into debt have all reduced in the last year. Nonetheless, these percentages remain significant and this year 58% of residents said they either only have enough for essentials, or they tend to run out of money before the end of the week/month.
Our methodology
The Clarion Index has used a consistent methodology year-on-year since 2012:
- 2,000 telephone interviews completed
- Representative sample with quotas set for gender, age, ethnicity and region based on resident population
- Sample provides robust findings at +/-2% at a 95% confidence level
- Conducted between 30 May and 28 June 2024
- Tracking questions used to establish trends
- New questions added to address business need
- 60 questions in a 15 min survey