The Week in Housing: new Gateway 2 guidance, and BSR and RSH agree closer working

There was also news that the BSR has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Regulator of Social Housing (RSH). The agreement will see the two regulators share details on housing providers’ failures and risk.

The BSR will notify the RSH when it serves a compliance notice to a building owned by a registered provider, or when the BSR issues a special measures order. Similarly, the RSH will notify the BSR before it publishes its own regulatory judgements.

This commitment to closer working came after the government published the details of its long-awaited Remediation Acceleration Plan. You can read what we learned from the 22 new commitments here.

The Building Control Independent Panel made its first public statement, which highlighted that commercial bodies were returning building control work to councils in “unreasonable circumstances”.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors warned its members to be wary of misusing credentials after the high-profile expulsion of a fire safety engineer from another trade body earlier this year.

Despite challenges such as BSR delays, many housing associations are managing to get new projects off the ground. This week, Inside Housing published exclusive data on which of them started the most homes. The analysis found work started on 34,437 homes in 2024-25 – a 0.4% drop compared with 34,569 last year.

Elsewhere in building safety news, a panel has been convened to review poor-quality insulation retrofits installed under government schemes. It follows the suspension of 39 firms in January.

This week, a ban on Grenfell fire barrier supplier Siderise was lifted, which was placed on it by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in the wake of the tower-block fire. It followed a legal challenge which found the supplier “in no way contributed to the fire or its spread”.

Once again, the number of families in temporary accommodation has risen, with the number of dependent children in temporary accommodation hitting another record of 169,050. Homelessness charity Shelter said the numbers showed the crisis was escalating to “new extremes”, and repeated calls for the government to rethink its freeze of the Local Housing Allowance (LHA).

It is a call the sector has made repeatedly in recent months, and the prime minister said he would “look again” at LHA rates when the Liaison Committee asked him about it.

In the same session, Sir Keir Starmer also claimed there was “lots of housing in many local authorities” that could be used for temporary accommodation.

On the other side of the house, Sir James Cleverly was made shadow housing secretary after Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative Party leader, reshuffled her senior team.

In Liverpool, the city council is resorting to procuring houses in multiple occupation and studios from private landlords in a bid to reduce the number of people staying in B&Bs and hotels. The council is likely to spend £28.4m on temporary housing by the end of the current financial year.

This chimes with a report which found councils were spending so much on “high-demand” acute pressures such as homelessness that they were being forced to cut back on other services, such as looking after parks and roads. 

Audit Wales found Welsh councils have made “limited progress” in preventing homelessness and are failing to use tools at their disposal that could save money on temporary accommodation.

Insurance was also in the news this week, as thousands of leaseholders sent letters to freeholders before action in a joint claim over “secret” insurance commissions.

There was good news for Peabody, whose earlier legal victory over the National House Building Council over an insolvency insurance claim was upheld in the court of appeal.

In an exclusive interview, David Partridge, the former boss of Related Argent, spoke to Inside Housing about his new retrofit venture and developing a net-zero building standard.

We also reported on interesting research that revealed the income and demographics in the build-to-rent sector.

Have a great weekend.

Ella Jessel, deputy news editor, Inside Housing

Say hello: ella.jessel@insidehousing.co.uk

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