By Rob Gershon, Associate, HQN

Last week, the Secretary of State for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government wrote this letter to the Chair of the Board of the Regulator of Social Housing, Bernadette Conroy, and its incoming chief executive, Jonathan Walters, who will be familiar to any regulator-watchers as previously having been the department’s deputy chief executive under departing leader Fiona MacGregor, and its director of strategy.

The announcement of the new appointment also included mention of the government’s often-stated goal of building, baby, building. Sometimes it feels a bit like they spend more time talking about building more homes than actually pulling the policy levers that would realistically lead to the construction of the social rent homes the country needs, rather than all the other unaffordable tenures that many places could do without.

There’s a possibility that the letter is just another tiny political stunt, making just enough noise to make it seem like the government hasn’t forgotten about housing supply, while all around us the lack of social rent homes drags individuals and families into entrenched poverty, affecting people’s chances of getting and holding down a job, settling down to start families or businesses, while effectively performing the unpaid care the government relies on in the absence of having any kind of policy to deal with the social care system at all.

There are several key elements of the letter which cause concern. The first is best highlighted in the last paragraph, a kind of quiet justification for putting aside tenants, their safety or their concerns in favour of building any kind of homes. It’s not quite the same meal as the Reform housing spokesperson who said we should put aside safety concerns to build, baby, build, but it shares some of the same flavour.

“The tenants I spoke to seem unclear on what the Tenant Satisfaction Measures are actually for. They certainly don’t provide us with the ability to compare landlords that we were promised”

In directing the regulator to focus on homebuilding, the letter feels the need to say out loud “this should be achieved while of course continuing to hold providers to account for delivering high-quality and safe homes and services”. There’s at least a recognition that what has actually been happening within the social housing sector is that some landlords have retreated from new builds because they don’t have the resources to provide these at the same time as doing the remedial work on a long list of quality and repairs issues that keep coming up again, and again (and again) at the Housing Ombudsman and elsewhere.

The letter also risks showing a broad ignorance of what the government’s own departments are for. After the Grenfell Tower Fire, the Homes and Communities Agency was deliberately split into two separate parts to avoid exactly the kind of conflict of interest within government that contributed to the conditions necessary for the fire to take place.

Promoting and facilitating the building of more housing became the job of Homes England, and the long process that led to the Regulation of Social Housing Act ended up giving the RSH a new remit and new powers to rebalance the relationship between landlords and tenants.

Except it hasn’t.

I recently had the privilege of spending a day with tenants from all over the country, some of whom have been doing involved tenant stuff for years and some who’ve never done it, and one of the points that kept coming up from the policy nerd tenants was that they don’t think the new regulatory regime has enough teeth. The consumer standards are a ‘good idea’, but the regulator rarely seems to use its new powers beyond giving the occasional council a C4. The tenants I spoke to seem unclear on what the Tenant Satisfaction Measures are actually for. They certainly don’t provide us with the ability to compare landlords that we were promised.

Attempting to repurpose the regulator to focus its resources on the job Homes England should be doing feels like it risks treading a familiar and dangerous path.