Everyone in this country deserves to live in a safe and decent home. It is unacceptable in a country like the UK that anyone should have thick black mould covering their walls and have to worry about their children breathing in spores; to be put at risk of slipping on a permanently wet floor; or to have water dripping through their ceiling on to electrical appliances, putting their safety at risk. Yet too many people in social housing do live in circumstances such as these. And too often, social housing residents have simply not been listened to or felt respected by their landlords when they have tried to raise complaints, or simply talk to their landlord about these issues.
The package of reforms I am announcing today helps address these issues and is just one of a number of reforms that the Government have delivered since the Grenfell Tower fire, including the Building Safety Bill and the Fire Safety Act, to help social housing tenants live in safe and decent homes. We have made progress. In 2010, 20% of social homes were classified as non-decent. In 2019, 13% of social homes were classified as non-decent. However, we must go further.
That is why the Government will bring forward legislation when parliamentary time allows which will ensure robust regulation of social housing landlords, a policy that has long been championed by bereaved families and survivors of the Grenfell tragedy. We published “The Charter for Social Housing Residents: Social Housing White Paper” after talking to thousands of residents across the country about their experiences. This set out a wide range of measures designed to drive up standards and fix a broken complaints system including by beefing up regulation of the sector, strengthening the Housing Ombudsman Service, and empowering residents to know and exercise their rights. We know we need to go even further than this to make sure that we are delivering for residents up and down the country, which is why one of our 12 missions set out in the Government’s “Levelling Up” White Paper is to halve the number of non-decent rented homes by 2030.
Today I am announcing a package of measures which represent important steps forward. These measures are:
Social housing regulation legislation
A Resident Panel
Naming and Shaming
Tenant factsheet
Social Housing Regulation Legislation
Social housing tenants deserve to be better informed by their landlords, treated with courtesy and respect and to have their problems quickly resolved. Unfortunately, this has not always been the experience of residents in social housing.
The upcoming legislation will enable a new, proactive approach to the regulation of social housing landlords on consumer issues such as safety, transparency and tenant engagement, with new enforcement powers to tackle failing landlords. It will support a strong new regulatory regime which will drive a significant change in landlord behaviour, ensuring landlords focus on the needs of their tenants and are held to account for their performance.