Survey of Tenants and Residents (STAR) documents - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Accessibility legislation (on legislation.gov.uk website) states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format, unless doing so would impose a disproportionate burden on the organisation. If that is the case, an assessment of the extent to which compliance with the accessibility requirement imposes a disproportionate burden must be carried out.

This is a Disproportionate Burden Assessment for the Survey of Tenants and Residents (STAR) documents which are in PDF format.

The benefits of creating an HTML version of this PDF would be:

• a fully accessible version for all users to access
• an easily searchable and indexable version

We are required by the Regulator of Social Housing to provide a summary of approach to the TSM perception survey and a copy of the questionnaire on our website. As they have recently contacted us and pointed out that this information is missing, we need to add it as soon as possible so we are compliant with regulations.

These documents were created by the provider of the TSM perception survey. To make the documents fully accessible we would need to go back to them, which would take time and be costly.

Also relevant to this decision are that:

• We are legally required to make the document available to the public, so the document must be published on the Council’s website
• Due to the nature of this content, there was a need to publish the document quickly, so we took the decision to publish the PDF
• The document is from a third-party source or organisation
• We have and will always assist with accessible versions on request

We are required by the Regulator of Social Housing to provide a summary of approach to the TSM perception survey and a copy of the questionnaire on our website. As they have recently contacted us and pointed out that this information is missing, we need to add it as soon as possible so we are compliant with social housing regulations.

These documents were created by the provider of the TSM perception survey. To make the documents fully accessible we would need to go back to them, which would take time and be costly.

Should anyone ask for an accessible version, we would make every effort to provide them with the data included in the documents.

We will include a requirement in future contracts with survey providers to make documents accessible.

12 September 2025