3.9 million tenants in English Social Housing – lets shout.
The Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee has launched an inquiry examining the quality and regulation of social housing in England.
If a housing association or council is your landlord this comes under the term ‘social housing’ and you have a ‘social landlord’.
It is outrageous that every day tenants are forced to seek legal advice as their landlords are not properly fixing the issues in our homes. Legal advice to fix housing conditions can be hard to get and the mechanisms that tenants are offered to get the housing issue addressed themselves – don’t always work. This has a horrendous consequence as we are forced to live in properties with damp, no heating, no hot water, insects and serious housing issues that impact our health.
These are the questions the inquiry is asking:
- How widespread and serious are the concerns about the quality of social housing?
- What is the impact on social housing providers’ resources, and therefore their ability to maintain and improve their housing stock, of the need to remediate building safety risks and retrofit their homes to make them more energy efficient?
- Is the current regime for regulating social housing fit for purpose?
- How clearly defined are the roles of the Regulator of Social Housing and the Housing Ombudsman?
- Does the current regime allow tenants to effectively resolve issues?
- Do the regulator and ombudsman have sufficient powers to take action against providers?
- Will the reforms proposed in the social housing White Paper improve the regime and what progress has been made on implementing those reforms?
- What changes, if any, should the Government make to the Decent Homes Standard?
- Should the Decent Homes Standard be amended to include energy efficiency and other means of mitigating climate change, and if so how?
- Should all providers of social housing, not just councils, be required to register with the regulator?
- What challenges does the diversification of social housing providers pose for the regulatory system?
As a law centre we don’t always have capacity to take the housing cases to demand that tenants individual homes are fixed. We need all social housing to be fixed. Social housing to have better funding to fix major issues and better management of finances so these issues don’t arise. We also need the mechanisms that complaints are dismissed with such as the Housing Ombudsman to actually work.
We would like to use this inquiry as an opportunity to do something together.
You can respond to the consultation here —> Call for Evidence – Committees – UK Parliament
Lets do something more to highlight this issue together. What do you think?
What should we do together to demand better social housing?
The Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee should listen to us and everything we have to say about the social housing. Would love to hear ideas you come up with. Contact Rhi at South West London Law Centres at community@swllc.org