Repayment Agreements are a tool aimed at providing an ethical and fair path to recover arrears while helping tenants in financial distress. However, our research has revealed that the way these powerful tools are being administered and managed in practice is unsustainable and potentially doing more harm than good.
One staggering stat sums it up: 90% of Repayment Agreements (also sometimes known as ‘Repayment Arrangements’ or simply ‘Agreements’ - a term we’ll use for the rest of the blog) fail within three to six months. Looking deeper, it’s hardly a surprise - without appropriate systems to track why, when, or how they break down, failure is more or less inevitable. Ironically, the true scale of the problem has remained hidden largely due to inability to report within these same inadequate systems.
It’s clear that current systems must change, which is why we produced the whitepaper, ‘We Need to Talk About Agreements.’ This blog summarises its key findings.
Why agreements fail
Agreements are so powerful in theory because they address both psychological and practical needs for all parties - restoring control and dignity to tenants in debt while giving landlords long-term stability and better relationships with their customers.
However, in practice, Agreements are plagued by high failure rates and systemic inefficiencies. The crisis stems from two critical breakdowns:
- Housing Management Systems (HMS) used to track and manage Agreements are counterproductive. Outdated platforms misclassify cases, obscure critical data, and leave landlords flying blind. For income officers handling hundreds of cases, the results are Agreements built on guesswork, not insight.
- Tenants sign Agreements but don’t have sufficient commitment and buy-in to see them through. With inflexible terms ignoring real-world pressures, tenants are often either forced or simply choose to ignore them over time. This is especially the case for many individuals who also face other debt obligations from often much more aggressive private creditors.
What’s more, the urgency to fix these issues and embrace the full potential of Agreements has never been greater, as the cost-of-living crisis and Universal Credit changes push more tenants into financial distress than ever before.
Control the controllables
Agreements success depends on multiple factors across different levels. Some, like broader structural and societal factors, lie beyond landlords' control. Others - such as the systems and practices used to manage Agreements - are within landlords’ grasp and can be leveraged and optimised. By focusing on these actionable areas, landlords can significantly improve outcomes. Our research has highlighted a number of critical priorities, including:
- Embracing human interaction: To maximise adherence, it’s crucial to foster a sense of shared ownership and give tenants a voice in the terms-setting process. As one of the officers in our research commented: “It’s about having a conversation with the customer, the customer then taking ownership of the debt.” Yet many social landlords lack the systems and training to make this happen. In the report, we discuss options for equipping income teams for truly empathetic, productive conversations.
- Getting the balance right: Setting workable payment values, frequencies, and instalment numbers is critical to Agreement success. Trust plays an important role in determining affordable instalment amounts. Allowing tenants to self-report what they can afford, and taking this at face value, can also strengthen the landlord-tenant relationship. Tailoring timelines to individual circumstances can also boost commitment and follow-through.
- Acknowledging competing priorities: Agreement payments battle against other essential and discretionary financial obligations. As one respondent noted, often “there’s too much life happening.” Landlords can compete ethically with these through timely, tenant-focused intervention and flexibility particularly around factors such as seasonal pinchpoints.
- Employing risk and reward: Without clear consequences, tenants may see Agreements as unconditional - risking a lack of commitment and payment complacency. Solutions include creating a sense of ‘eligibility’ to reinforce responsibility and establishing positive reinforcement mechanisms (e.g. instant acknowledgment of on-time payments with an active signalling of gratitude).
- Data-driven decision-making: Income officers require much better and more integrated reporting platforms to track and monitor broken, existing and new agreements. Enhancements such as real-time insights and dynamic risk profiling can enable officers to make more accurate forecasting and targeted interventions.
- Smarter reporting and data use: Likewise, integrated, ‘one view of the truth’ systems are essential for enabling real-time performance tracking against targets at an organisational level, as well as ensuring vital information flows seamlessly across departments. This supports decision-makers across the likes of finance and housing teams, right up to the executive team, to make informed strategic decisions.
Making the opportunities a reality
Drawing on our findings, we have developed a new, evidence-based framework to Agreement management - which we set out in detail in the report. The approach is centred around a set of ‘Golden Moments’ - key communication touchpoints that present the greatest opportunity to establish and manage effective Agreements. It comprises:
- Engage: Engaging the customer at the right time
- Assess: Conversations to understand the tenant’s circumstances
- Negotiate: Collaboratively negotiating optimal instalment amounts and payment terms.
- Confirm: Encouraging commitment with confirmation of terms through multiple channels.
- Remind: Timely reminders of when payments are due to reactivate commitment devices.
- Reinforce: Responding to payment behaviours (both positive and negative) as they occur.
Technology has an important role to play in enabling this framework, offering the potential to transform raw data into precise insights while proactively identifying emerging risks.
By automating routine monitoring and communications, such solutions can create space for what matters most - human conversations. Officers gain both the time for meaningful, informed engagement and the real-time intelligence to intervene early when challenges arise. A participant in our research noted that technology is “about freeing up time to have meaningful conversations to determine if an Agreement is even the right solution. And if it is, giving you earlier, more accurate visibility of when something starts to go wrong.”
Responding to these needs (and in conjunction with the industry), we’ve recently launched Agreements Manager - a next-generation platform combining behavioural science, predictive analytics and AI. Designed around the Golden Moments framework, it distills complex data into essential insights while preserving human judgement.
With Agreements Manager, officers retain full decision-making authority, empowered by intelligent tools that highlight opportunities and priorities without replacing professional expertise. Some of the platform’s functions and capabilities include:
- Real-time, accurate tracking of every Agreement’s status and a single, live dashboard.
- Evidence-based, automated messaging throughout Agreements processes.
- Objective recommendations for instalment amounts, with flexibility for officers to adjust at their discretion.
- Automated communications to outline terms and invoke moral obligations.
- Ongoing response to payment behaviour (positive and negative), with tailored messaging.
If you want to take a deeper dive into this project and the Golden Moments framework, download the report here. To learn more about Agreements Manager, visit: https://www.voicescape.com/services/agreements-manager