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The year in review: regulation and legal

Insight15.12.2112.00 PM by Grainne Cuffe

The reintroduction of consumer regulation to a bolstered English regulator has been a big story this year, taking place against a backdrop of landlords breaching standards for health and safety. Grainne Cuffe reports

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The reintroduction of consumer regulation to a bolstered English regulator has been a big story this year, taking place against a backdrop of landlords breaching standards for health and safety. @Grainne_Cuffe reports #UKhousing

Implementing changes in response to the long-awaited Social Housing White Paper, published in November 2020, has been top of the agenda for England’s Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) this past year.

The aim of the white paper was to amplify the voice of social housing tenants in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, which exposed how the opinions of residents often went unheard.

At the heart of the paper is the plan to give increased powers to the RSH and move back to a more proactive approach to consumer regulation. This will see landlords begin to be assessed on things like repairs and complaints, in addition to the existing financial viability and governance standards.

So what has the RSH done to prepare for the reintroduction of consumer regulation?

At the start of the year, the regulator appointed its first ever director of consumer regulation. Kate Dodsworth, former chief executive of Gateway Housing, took up the new role in the summer. You can read our interview with Ms Dodsworth here.

Eleven months later, an in-depth plan for consumer regulation was published. The plan identified six themes: safety, quality, neighbourhood, transparency, engagement and accountability, and tenancies.

The regulator also made headway on another change to be introduced in response to the Social Housing White Paper: the introduction of new tenant satisfaction measures. In June, it formed a sounding board – made up of sector bodies – to help decide the set of tenant satisfaction measures to be used.

This work culminated in the launch of a consultation this month, which revealed the 22 tenant satisfaction measures the regulator has planned. Social landlords are set to be measured on five main themes, including repairs, building safety, effective complaints-handling, respectful and helpful tenant engagement, and responsible neighbourhood management.

Judgements

The RSH made several eye-catching rulings against social landlords over the past year.

A number of social landlords were found to have breached the Home Standard due to health and safety failings. This included GreenSquareAccord – after it was found that hundreds of its homes did not have a current fire risk assessment – as well as South Kesteven, Cornwall, Welwyn Hatfield and Croydon councils.

In addition to breaching the Home Standard, Croydon Council became the second council ever to breach the regulator’s Tenant Involvement and Empowerment Standard after the RSH found that some of the homes the local authority managed were “uninhabitable and unsafe” and that some tenants were at “risk of serious harm” as a result. It followed an ITV exposé of terrible conditions on one of its estates.

In November two large G15 landlords, Network Homes and Southern Housing, were found to have breached the Rent Standard by not implementing the 1% rent cut across a four-year period between April 2016 and March 2020.

Elsewhere, the regulator has continued to focus on leased-based providers of specialist supported housing (SSH). The regulator has been critical of this model for more than two years now and has regularly downgraded SSH providers that enter into long-term, index-linked lease agreements.

This year was no different, with providers Auckland Home Solutions, Larch and Falcon among those that were rated non-compliant.

The regulator has also taken a much keener interest in exempt accommodation providers, which provide housing that is exempt from housing benefit caps due to the landlord providing loosely defined care and support services.

The regulator has issued non-compliant judgements against 13 providers so far.

In an unusual move in March, Birmingham-based housing association Green Park, a for-profit exempt accommodation provider, was de-registered after it was deemed non-compliant in 2019.

Homelessness charities and councils have been calling for greater regulation of the sector, amid warnings that unscrupulous landlords are exploiting the system to receive high rents without providing any support.

Legal

Turning to legal now, here are some of the big cases that came out this year:

In March, Lambeth Council began proceedings against Notting Hill Genesis, Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing and Optivo following a lengthy campaign by the St Martin’s Estate Tenants and Residents Association over issues with damp and mould
In November, Inside Housing reported that a homebuyer was suing for £1m, with court papers alleging that she had been deceived by a Section 106 “conspiracy”
Also in November, we reported that a management agent is attempting to sue Prospect Housing, an exempt accommodation provider that has been forced to close down, with £1.25m in unpaid rents.
This month it emerged that the government is facing a judicial review for “misleading the public” over its Everyone In scheme
Multiple councils’ allocations policies were challenged in court, including those of Westminster and Birmingham