By Rob Gershon, Associate, HQN
Fresh from my ad-hoc, alphabetical Social Housing Advent Calendar and its critical friendship and quiet annoyance about Christmas at the end of last year, I find myself stood on the cusp of yet another ‘New’ Year. I’m not making any resolutions. It’s 2026 and I’m still wondering why people invest so much importance into some days on the calendar and not others.
Yet for the housing sector there’s much to be done. Resolutions aren’t firm enough commitments for the work ahead – we can’t afford to fall off the wagon during the first couple of weeks. The work is too important and we should be planning to get some things done this year. Some of this takes the form of evolving policy, with the new Decent Homes Standard in the pipeline and all the other areas it touches on: furniture and flooring poverty; the ongoing challenges of damp, mould and safety issues being added to Awaab’s Law; and plenty more.
The expectations in the new Decent Home Standard will be one thing, but, as ever, it’s the outcomes that need to change. With no apparent sign of a step-change in the delivery of new social rent homes, allocations policies will remain both crucial and likely inadequate. Some things need immediate attention – with victims of domestic abuse still being moved into temporary accommodation or bare properties without consideration of amenities or longer-term security, the very tenets underpinning who needs homes and when remain paramount.
“The expectations in the new Decent Home Standard will be one thing, but, as ever, it’s the outcomes that need to change”
For all the stable-sounding news in the shiny new Regulator of Social Housing’s Global Accounts report, the sector is still not in a position to deliver the wider ask most understand is necessary to change the supply landscape. Somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 social rent homes delivered each year are necessary not just to provide homes but to embed long-term returns on serious housing investment for landlords and the Treasury and wider economy. Calling the government-approved tenant information service “4 million homes” belies a lack of ambition for this number changing any time soon, but we should be aspiring to print new stationery for them by 2035.
On the subject of tenant-related groups, the change in government has meant there’s now a door that’s been opened, just a crack, with the potential for an independent, tenant-led group to get their foot in. There are no shortage of potential candidates to be wearing the shoe: the Social Housing Action Campaign’s ‘Tenant Union’ and the independent National Tenant Federation have both had meetings with the government’s housing minister in the House of Lords. The National Tenant Alliance have funding from the Longleigh Foundation and Health Creation Alliance and are already in the recruitment phase beyond their steering group, looking to design a leadership programme to train prospective tenants to head up the alliance.
Three might seem like a crowd but the groups all have some common goals in mind, underpinned by ensuring tenant voices aren’t filtered through any other organisations and putting rebalancing power between landlords and tenants at the centre of their purpose. From the Social Housing Green Paper to the Regulation of Social Housing Act, various governments have claimed that they are going to empower tenants to hold their landlords to account, but in no way has any of the new legislation actually achieved this yet.
Landlords will have to continue with the administration and data tasks inherent in consumer regulation changes, current and upcoming, but one way or another change is coming to bring tenant power that hasn’t asked for approval and won’t be constrained by having to be quite so polite.
