November 2020
The Government has published ‘The Charter for Social Housing Residents’, its Social Housing White Paper. The White Paper considers the issues facing those who rent, leaseholders and shared owners in social housing, and generally refers to them all as “residents” except where an issue is only relevant to those who are renting from a social housing landlord, in which case they refer to “tenants”.
The White Paper draws from the views of residents across England, and its new charter sets out what every social housing resident should expect from their landlord:
1. To be safe in their homes
What does this mean?
The Government has identified ways both to raise safety standards and to help residents feel safer in their homes. It will work with industry and landlords to ensure every home is safe and secure, and intends to:
- Legislate to strengthen the Regulator of Social Housing’s consumer regulation objectives to explicitly include safety
- Legislate to require social landlords to identify a nominated person responsible for complying with their health and safety requirements
- Expect the Regulator of Social Housing to prepare a Memorandum of Understanding with the Health and Safety Executive to ensure effective sharing of information with the Building Safety Regulator
- Launch a consultation on requiring smoke alarms in social housing and introducing new expectations for carbon monoxide alarms
- Consult on measures to ensure that social housing residents are protected from harm caused by poor electrical safety.
- Continue to work with the Social Sector (Building Safety) Engagement Best Practice Group and the Building Safety Regulator to ensure resident voices are heard.
2. To know how their landlord is performing
What does this mean?
The Government plans to create a set of tenant satisfaction measures for landlords on things that matter to tenants. This will inform how a landlord is performing and what decisions it is making. Thus, enabling them to be challenged when things are not working as they should, and to compare the performance of other social landlords. To this end then Government will:
- Introduce a new access to information scheme for social housing tenants of housing associations and other private registered providers of social housing, so that information relating to landlords is easily available.
- Ensure landlords provide a clear breakdown of how their income is being spent.
- Require landlords to identify a senior person in their organisation who is responsible for ensuring they comply with the consumer standards set by the Regulator of Social Housing.
3. To have complaints dealt with promptly and fairly
What does this mean?
Residents should get swift and effective resolution of complaints. Government will:
- Provide residents with consistency across landlord complaint handling by ensuring landlords self-assess against the Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code by 31 December 2020.
- Ensure tenants know how to raise complaints and have confidence in the system by launching a communications campaign.
- Expect landlords, the Housing Ombudsman and the Building Safety Regulator to ensure residents have clear and up to date information on how to complain.
- Legislate to ensure clear co-operation between the Housing Ombudsman and the Regulator of Social Housing to hold landlords to account more effectively when things go wrong.
- Make landlords more accountable for their actions by publicising the details of cases determined and published by the Housing Ombudsman.
4. To be treated with respect
What does this mean?
Transformation of consumer regulation to further drive the right behaviors and hold landlords to account when they fail. This means:
- Transforming the consumer regulation role of the Regulator of Social Housing (“the regulator”) so it proactively monitors and drives landlords’ compliance with improved consumer standards.
- Remove the ‘serious detriment test’ and introduce routine inspections for the largest landlords (those with over 1,000 homes) every four years.
- Change the regulator’s objectives to explicitly cover safety and transparency, and work with it to review its consumer standards to ensure they are up to date and deliver its revised objectives.
- Give the regulator the power to publish a Code of Practice on the consumer standards to be clear what landlords are required to deliver.
- Strengthen the regulator’s enforcement powers to tackle failing landlords and to respond to new challenges facing the sector.
- Hold local authorities to account as landlords, including how they manage Arm’s Length Management Organisations and Tenant Management Organisations, to make sure they deliver a good service to tenants.
- Require the regulator to set up an Advisory Committee to provide independent and unbiased advice on discharging its functions.
5. To have their voice heard by their landlord
What does this mean?
Government will:
- Expect the regulator to require landlords to seek out best practice and consider how they can continually improve the way they engage with social housing tenants.
- Support more effective engagement between landlords and residents and give residents tools to influence their landlords and hold them to account.
- Review professional training and development to ensure residents receive a high standard of customer service.
6. To have a good quality home and neighbourhood to live in
What does this mean?
To ensure social tenants have good quality, decent homes and neighbourhoods, including access to green space and support for wellbeing, Government intends to:
- Review the Decent Homes Standard, including access to and the quality of green spaces.
- Tackle anti-social behaviour by enabling tenants to know who is responsible for action and who can support and assist them if they are faced with antisocial behaviour.
- Consider the results of the allocations evidence collection exercise findings to ensure that housing is allocated in the fairest way possible and achieves the best outcomes for local places and communities.
7. To be supported to take their first step to ownership
What does this mean?
The Government’s plans include:
- Implementing a new, fairer and more accessible model for Shared Ownership.
- Implementing a new Right to Shared Ownership for tenants of housing associations and other private registered providers who live in new grant funded homes for rent.
- Emphasising through its new National Design Guide the importance of building beautiful and well-designed social homes.
Building safety:
Building safety is a top priority for the government, and through this white paper they aim to put residents back at the heart of building safety. In July the government published the building safety bill, which brings forward measures to put in place an enhanced regulatory regime for all buildings. The new safety regime will give residents a stronger voice and will deliver stronger enforcement and sanctions to ensure homes are safe.
To bring forward these changes the government wants to create a culture where landlords and building safety managers communicate effectively with their residents on safety issues. Through the building safety bill the government is introducing a requirement for the ‘Accountable Person’ for each higher- risk building to produce and implement a resident engagement strategy to promote the participation of tenants and leaseholders in decisions that are made about building safety risks in their building.
The resident engagement strategy will help to ensure that:
- residents automatically receive information about the fire and structural protections in place to manage risks within their building, and are able to access the building Safety Case Report (a report that the Accountable Person will have to write in which they make an explicit claim that they are managing major accident risks within the building and evidence exactly how they are going about it) and more detailed safety information about the building where appropriate, if they wish to do so;
- residents have access to a quick and effective route to raise complaints about fire and structural safety; and that
- residents have information to enable them to understand and fulfil their safety responsibilities.
Housing Secretary The Right Honourable. Robert Jenrick MP said:
“We are delivering on the commitment we made to the Grenfell community that, never again, would the voices of residents go unheard. This white paper will bring transformational change for social housing residents, giving them a much stronger voice and, in doing so, re-focusing the sector on its social mission.
“I want to see social housing tenants empowered by a regulatory regime and a culture of transparency, accountability, decency and service befitting of the best intentions and deep roots of social housing in this country.
“The new approach and regulatory changes we set out in this white paper will make a measurable difference to the lived experiences of those living in England’s 4 million social homes in the years ahead.”
Alongside publishing the white paper, the Housing Secretary has also announced a consultation on mandating smoke and carbon monoxide alarms in all rental homes.
For more information on the proposed reforms you can read the full white paper here