A new deal for social housing residents in the UK has been announced as part of the Government’s plan to improve fairness, quality and safety for tenants.
The social housing green paper aims to rebalance the relationship between tenants and landlords, tackle stigma and ensure that social housing can be both a safety net and springboard into home ownership.
Announcing the deal, Secretary of State for Housing and Communities, James Brokenshire, said that he wants to start a national discussion to collect views on how to improve social housing, based around five core principles set out in the paper and consultation document.
These are being able to offer a safe and decent home which is fundamental to a sense of security and ability to get on in life and swift and effective resolution so that when residents have concerns about the safety or standard of their home they see results.
It also means empowering residents and ensuring their voices are heard so that landlords are held to account, tackling stigma, challenging the stereotypes that exists about residents and their communities and building the social homes that are needed as well as ensuring that those homes can act as a springboard to home ownership.
He wants tenants to be able to hold their landlords to account and get the support they need to seek redress when things go wrong while a tougher regulator will be put in place to drive up standards and ensure social homes are well managed and quality places to live.
‘Providing high quality and well managed social housing is a core priority for this Government. Our green paper offers a landmark opportunity for major reform to improve fairness, quality and safety for residents living in social housing across the country,’ said Brokenshire.
‘Regardless of whether you own your home or rent, residents deserve security, dignity and the opportunities to build a better life. The aspirations and concerns of thousands of residents have shaped the Government’s new direction for social housing and are at the heart of the proposals in this consultative green paper,’ he added.
The reforms will make it easier for tenants to progress into home ownership, such as allowing them to purchase as little as 1% of their property each year through the government’s Shared Ownership programme.
There will also be a strengthened Regulator of Social Housing so it can focus on issues that matter most to tenants and has ‘sharper teeth’ to intervene when needed, ensuring social homes are well managed and of decent quality.
Councils will be permitted to continue to have choice over their use of fixed term tenancies, enabling them to offer residents greater security in their homes and performance indicators and new league tables will be introduced.
The consultation gives everyone the opportunity to feed in views on proposals for the future of social housing and will run until 06 November 2018.
In a separate move, to boost the number of local authority homes, a consultation into how councils spend the money from Right to Buy sales has also been launched. It looks at reforming the Right to Buy replacement target, to give a broader measure of Government’s impact on social housing.
It sets out proposals to make it easier for councils to replace properties sold under Right to Buy and build the affordable homes their communities need, continuing a programme that has helped almost 94,000 households onto the housing ladder since 2010.
The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) welcomed the focus on rebalancing the relationship between tenants and landlords, but called for detail and concrete proposals.
Tamara Sandoul, policy manager at the CIEH, said that the tone of the green paper seems to mark a change of direction from previous government policy, with an acceptance of the merit of social housing as a safety net.
‘Although Environmental Health Professionals, who are charged with assessing the safety of privately rented housing, cannot enforce social housing, in the aftermath of Grenfell it is vital that the safety of social housing is revisited along with the provision of clear routes for redress,’ she explained.
‘We also strongly support the proposed review of the decent homes standard. This standard needs to align with standards for other tenures, so that all housing is made safer and healthier, and is simple for landlords to understand,’ she added.
‘However, there really are very few tangible proposals in this announcement. What we need to see are some concrete proposals from the Government on how they are going to ensure safe and high quality housing across the board, and what resources are going to be committed to it,’ she concluded.
But Campbell Robb, chief executive of the independent Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said that families on low incomes are still not being helped. ‘Families up and down the country are being trapped in poverty because of high housing costs. The Social Housing Green Paper was an opportunity to right this wrong and deliver a plan that would build a new generation of social housing that would loosen the grip of poverty on families and help people to build a secure future,’ he pointed out.
‘Whilst the plans to empower tenants and give them a real voice are very welcome the lack of concrete plans to build significantly more truly affordable homes risks failing a generation. Against a back drop of rising foodbank use, families on low incomes will continue to face impossible choices about whether to pay the rent or put food on the table. We urge the Government to invest in 80,000 genuinely affordable homes a year at the next Spending Review to put things right,’ he added.
