Back from the brink

Since the dramatic rescue of Cosmopolitan Housing Group by Sanctuary in the nick of time at the end of March, the dust has settled enough on the debacle to allow my colleague Carl Brown to chart how Cosmopolitan came so near to triggering a potential domino effect of re-pricing landlords’ debts by spooked investors.

The lessons in all this are clear for landlords - much of which has already been picked up by regulator the Homes and Communities Agency in its recasting of the English regulatory framework to account for the riskier environment in which landlords now operate.

There are lessons too, however, for the regulator: why did it approve the doomed merger of Cosmopolitan and Chester and District Housing Trust?; why did it not appoint Sanctuary to rescue Cosmopolitan in the first place? It is a shame the HCA report into all these lessons will not be published until ‘early next year’ - almost 12 months since the biggest crisis in modern social housing history was narrowly averted.